IN THE NEWS Business and technology news from the semiconductor and design tool industries.

In the News

American Microsystems, Inc. (Pocatello, Idaho) and General Electric Company's Corporate R&D Division (Schenectady, N.Y.) have begun codevelopment of an A/D converter ASIC cell for sensor interface requirements. The scalable A/D converter will consist of a third-order sigma-delta modulator and a decimation filter. GE will handle design and simulation and will support AMI in the layout of the modulator. AMI will perform layout and postlayout simulation of the modulator and decimation filter.

Lucent Technologies Microelectronics Pte. Ltd. and Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd. (both in Singapore) announced the formation of a $1-billion-plus joint venture to manufacture ICs. Called Silicon Manufacturing Partners Pte. Ltd., the joint venture will eventually employ about 800 people and will be located on Chartered's semiconductor fabrication campus at the Woodlands Industrial Park in Singapore.

* Meanwhile, Dense-Pac Microsystems, Inc. (Garden Grove, Calif.) has received a design win from Lucent Technologies for its high-density 256-Mbit memory. The device is being designed into Lucent's next-generation digital voice recognition products.

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (San Jose) and Synplicity, Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) have partnered to deliver synthesis capabilities within an integrated programmable logic and PCB design flow. The partnership provides for joint marketing and sales support. Cadence will offer Synplicity's Synplify and HDL Analyst products as part of the its PCB design and logic verification software, as well as a technology upgrade program with incentives for transitioning customers of Cadence's Synergy FPGA tools to Synplify's product line. Synplicity will provide Cadence with full access to its software to support advanced FPGA synthesis requirements.

Synopsys , Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) and Mentor Graphics Corp. (Beaverton, Ore.) have agreed to exchange licenses for Synopsys 's .lib format and Mentor Graphics' Calibre deep-submicron database format. In exchange for the .lib format, Mentor is licensing the database formats for Calibre's physical verification and extraction flow to Synopsys .

Mentor also announced an exclusive supplier agreement between its Inventra intellectual property division and Faraday Technology Corp. (Taiwan) for Inventra soft cores. Faraday will design ICs for its customers using Inventra soft cores and provide technical support for the cores.

Scenix Semiconductor, Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) shipped the first production parts in the SX series of microcontrollers. With the company's in-circuit development system, designers can use the chips to test and debug new system designs and program the on-chip flash EEPROM without special tools.

BTA Technology has established BTA Lab, a full-service lab that provides transistor and deep-submicron cell library characterization services for designers, ASIC suppliers, and foundries. Lab equipment includes a Cascade Microtech Summit 12500-Series Semiautomatic Parametric Probe Station for S-parameter measurement and HP, Keithley, and proprietary measurement equipment for commercial and military requirements.

Logicvision, Inc. (San Jose) opened a new European headquarters in Fareham, U.K. The office is part of the company's commitment to growing BIST and other embedded test solutions in Europe.

Siemens AG (Munich and Berlin) and Motorola, Inc. (Schaumburg, Ill.) have agreed to develop next-generation 300-mm (12-in.) wafer manufacturing technology in Dresden, Germany. The project will occupy a 26,000-square-foot area in an existing plant, which currently employs 2,400 people. R&D costs are expected to exceed $595 million, with additional investments of about $268 million. The project is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research, and Technology with $111 million, and the State of Saxony will invest approximately $71 million.

VLSI Technology, Inc. (San Jose) has signed a $1.1 million corporate-wide agreement by which VLSI Technology will purchase Artisan Components, Inc.'s (Sunnyvale, Calif.) 0.20-µm Process-Perfect high-speed 300-MHz synchronous single- and dual-port SRAM generators. VLSI will use the products in networking, digital entertainment, and advanced computing applications.

Triquint Semiconductor, Inc. (Hillsboro, Ore.) signed an agreement to acquire the monolithic microwave IC (MMIC) operations of Texas Instruments' former Defense Systems & Electronics Group from Raytheon Company (Lexington, Mass.) for approximately $39 million.

Parametric Technology Corp. (Waltham, Mass.) received a $3.8 million order for software and services from Seiko Epson (Nagano, Japan). All software in the order has already been shipped.

The Silicon Architects unit of Synopsys , Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) has launched the Certified CBA Design Center program, which will address the growing demand for reusable designs by helping a limited number of highly qualified design houses worldwide to provide design services and develop reusable intellectual property blocks using Synopsys 's cell-based array (CBA) architecture.

Frequency Technology, Inc. (San Jose) has agreed to resell certain solvers from Raphael, a tool from Technology Modeling Associates, Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) that performs interconnect analysis in ICs. Under the agreement, Frequency will embed the solvers into Columbus, a parasitic extractor designed to remove severe timing analysis inaccuracies that confront designers as IC feature sizes drop below 0.35 µm.

Texas Instruments, Inc. (Dallas) has agreed to purchase the principal assets and operations of Spectron Microsystems (Santa Barbara, Calif.), a wholly owned subsidiary of Dialogic Corp. (Parsippany, N.J.). Although specific terms are subject to closing adjustments, it's expected that the purchase price will be in the range of $20 million to $26 million.

SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (Lincoln, Mass.) has created a new sales and marketing organization. Known as Region Five, it includes Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and India. Based in Geneva, the organization is headed by Enrico Villa, reporting directly to Pasquale Pistorio, president and CEO.

Movers & Shakers

* Tanisys Technology, Inc. (Austin, Texas) has named Joseph C. Klein vice president of engineering. Klein had been vice president of engineering at PNY Technologies.

* Test Systems Strategies, Inc. (Beaverton, Ore.) has named John DiGirolamo president and CEO, succeeding Roger Bitter.

* Simtek Corp. (Colorado Springs) has appointed Douglas Mitchell CEO. He will also join Simtek's board of directors.

* Exemplar Logic, Inc. (Alameda, Calif.) has named Bob van Leyen chief financial officer. Also, Robert Barker has been appointed vice president and general manager of operations, and Thomas Feist has been promoted to vice president of marketing.

* NEC Electronics, Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has named Charles Sloan vice president of operations and Paul Nahi general manager of the multimedia business unit. Both executives are new to the company.

* LTX Corp. (Westwood, Mass.) has named Carol B. Langer vice president, chief financial officer, and treasurer. Langer will report directly to Roger Blethen , president and CEO, and will also direct investor relations for the company.

* ASIC International (Knoxville, Tenn.) has appointed Reid Wender to its technical staff. Wender will help support advanced systems and complex ASIC designs in DSP, communications, cryptography, graphics, audio, video, and rad-hard applications.

* Artisan Components, Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif) has appointed Lucio Lanza , a long-term member of its board of directors, chairman of the board. In addition, the company has named Eli Harari, CEO of Sandisk and a pioneer in nonvolatile memory, to its board of directors.

* Chrysalis Symbolic Design, Inc. (North Billerica, Mass.) has appointed Scott Sandler to the new position of marketing and technical support manager, Pacific Rim. Reporting to Michael Lanagan , vice president and general manager of international operations, Sandler will be responsible for Chrysalis's customer support and marketing activities in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Money Bits

Lattice Semiconductor Corp. (Hillsboro, Ore.) announced financial results for its third fiscal quarter, ended Dec. 27. Revenues were $60.0 million, up 18 percent from the $51.0 million reported in the same quarter a year ago but down 6 percent from last quarter's revenue of $64.1 million.

Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (Camarillo, Calif.) reported record revenues and net income for the first quarter of fiscal 1998, ended Dec. 31. Revenues were $34.7 million, an increase of 59 percent over the $21.8 million in the first quarter of fiscal 1997 and 12 percent over the $30.8 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 1997.

Dallas Semiconductor Corp. (Dallas) reported record net sales of $368.2 million for the year ended Dec. 28, up 28 percent compared with $288.4 million for the previous year. Net income was also a record, reaching $64.6 million ($2.19 per share), up 68 percent (60 percent per share) compared with $38.4 million ($1.37 per share) recorded for 1996.

Analogy, Inc. (Beaverton, Ore.) announced that revenues and net income for the third fiscal quarter, ended Dec. 31, were the highest of any quarter in the company's history. Total revenues for the quarter were $7.8 million, or 15 percent above the $6.8 million posted in the third quarter of fiscal 1997.

Semitool, Inc. (Kalispell, Mont.) reported an 11 percent increase in net sales and an 18 percent increase in net income for the first quarter of fiscal 1998 from the same quarter of fiscal 1997.

Corrections

The Focus Report table in the November 1997 issue covering design verification (p. 51) should have included Analogy, Inc.'s product Saber under the Analog/Mixed-Signal category. Information about the product has been added to the on-line versions of both the issue and the 1998 Vendor Guide.

Oki Semiconductor was inadvertently omitted from the CMOS ASICs table in our 1998 Vendor Guide (p. 54). The company's products have been added to the on-line versions of both the Guide and the July 1997 issue of the magazine.

Two articles in the February issue, "Design Methodology for Quickly and Accurately Generating SRAMs" by Lee Tavrow, John Johnson, and Mark Santoro (p. 24) and "Designers Tackle the Testability of a System-Level IC" by Ki Joo Jeong, Srini Krishnaswami, Bejoy G. Oomman, and Shankar Hemmady (p. 38) should have included a note indicating that they are based on presentations given at DesignCon98, held in January in Santa Clara, Calif.

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integrated system design  March 1998