In the News Business and technology news from the semiconductor and design tool industries.

In the News

LSI Logic Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.) and Hyundai Electronics America (San Jose) have signed a definitive agreement under which LSI Logic will acquire Symbios, Inc. (Fort Collins, Colo.), HEA's wholly owned subsidiary, for $760 million. Symbios will become a wholly owned subsidiary of LSI Logic, which anticipates completing the acquisition in its third quarter. Based on 1997 financial results, the combined revenues of the two companies in that year would have been approximately $1.9 billion.

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (San Jose) presented the U.S. District Court in San Jose with new allegations of copyright infringement and trade secret theft by Avanti Corp. (Fremont, Calif.). Cadence asked the court to extend the preliminary injunction order already in place against certain Avanti products to include Avanti's Aquarius product line. In addition, Cadence asked the court to lift the stay that has stood in the way of the case proceeding to a full civil trial that would decide on a permanent injunction and financial damages.

Tower Semiconductor, Ltd. (Migdal Haemek, Israel) has collaborated with IMEC (Leuven, Belgium) to put a new 0.35-µm CMOS process on-line, 12 months after the process transfer started. The joint project included the transfer and installation of IMEC's 0.35-µm front-end process and development work to adapt it to Tower's scaled back-end process. A number of process steps were performed at IMEC's submicron pilot line to speed up the integration phase at Tower.

Sony Corp. (San Jose) has licensed the TeakDSPcore family from DSP Group, Inc. (Santa Clara). Sony plans to use the cores in highly integrated wireless communication solutions for consumer applications.

Mosaid Technologies, Inc., (Kanata, Ont.), a supplier of engineering memory test systems and memory-chip design services, has formed an alliance with Process Intelligence, Ltd. (Edinburgh, Scotland). Under the agreement, Mosaid will begin offering Process Intelligence's Redundancy Allocation bit-mapping software for memory repair and Design Acumen, which optimizes memory redundancy designs, as options on Mosaid's engineering memory test systems.

Questmark Design Services (Boulder, Colo.) has become a design center to provide design services and technical support for FPGA customers of Atmel Corp. (San Jose). The partnership will allow Questmark to provide system-level design services, FPGA design flow and technical support, and IP development and integration.

Fujitsu, Ltd. (Tokyo), Fujitsu Microelectronics, Inc. (San Jose), and Phoenix Technologies, Ltd. (San Jose) have signed an agreement by which Fujitsu will license the complete line of Phoenix Virtual Chips PCI and USB synthesizable cores for use in its next generation of semiconductor products.

Pivotal Technologies LLC (Pasadena, Calif.) and Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (Milpitas) have signed a joint marketing agreement for analog and mixed-signal IP developed by Pivotal for Chartered's foundry processes. Pivotal will provide support to Chartered's customers with its Optimix line of analog and mixed building blocks: PLLs, A/D and D/A converters, crystal oscillators, charge pumps, and other analog interface support elements suitable for system-on-a-chip designs.

IBM Microelectronics, Inc. (Fishkill, N.Y.) will license Superflash memory technology from Silicon Storage Technology (Sunnyvale, Calif.). The agreement calls for IBM's use of the technology for custom chips combining logic and memory to be fabricated at 0.18 µm and below, and the company is exploring potential applications in ASICs as well.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.) has made a corporate-wide purchase of ICBIST, embedded ATE technology of Logicvision, Inc. (San Jose). Using existing methods and tools in design, Sun is incorporating embedded ATE in its ASIC design flow.

3DFX Interactive, Inc. (San Jose) has selected Quickturn System Realizer technology and time-to-market engineering services to assist in the development of its future 3D graphics products. System Realizer, made by Quickturn Design Systems, Inc. (also in San Jose), is based on the latest generation of FPGAs and comes complete with an integrated debugging environment and Quest II emulation software.

Movers and Shakers

NEC Electronics, Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has appointed Hirokazu Hashimoto its new president and CEO. Most recently, he was vice president of NEC Corp.'s semiconductor group, where he was responsible for supervising the solutions engineering and sales engineering divisions, the overseas semiconductor business, and ASIC and special product lines. Former president and CEO Shigeki Matsue has been promoted to chairman of NEC Electronics and also appointed to the board of directors of NEC Corp.

Larry Sonsini has joined the board of directors of Simplex Solutions, Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.). Sonsini is chairman of the executive committee of the Palo Alto, Calif., law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He's also currently a director of Novell, Lattice Semiconductor, and Pixar, and he serves on a number of advisory boards and committees, including the SEC's Advisory Committee on Capital Formation and Regulatory Processes, Stanford Law School's Law and Technology Council, and the Legal Advisory Committee to the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange.

The board of directors of VHDL International (Santa Clara) re-elected Steve Schulz , senior member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments, Inc. (Dallas), as president of the organization during its quarterly meeting held June 15 in San Francisco.

Cadabra Design Technology, Inc. (Santa Clara) has named Andrea Bush vice president of U.S. sales. Formerly with Avanti, she has 15 years of EDA sales experience.

James Poitras will join Integral Domain Technologies, Inc. (Santa Clara) as its president and CEO. He founded Integrated Silicon Systems in 1985 and served in the capacities of chairman, president, and CEO until retiring in 1996, when the company merged with Arcsys to form Avanti.

Dan Weed has joined LSI Logic Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.) as vice president of worldwide customer engineering, responsible for the field engineering organization and 40 design centers around the world. Prior to joining the company, Weed was vice president of worldwide sales at Symbios.

Actel Corp. (Sunnyvale) appointed three managers in its pan-Asian market segment for programmable gate arrays. They are Felix Chen , synthesis expert for the pan-Asian region; Henry Sun , regional sales manager for Asia-Pacific; and D. H. Chung , South Korean account sales manager.

Money Bits

Quickturn Design Systems, Inc. (San Jose) announced that revenues for the second quarter, ended June 30, were approximately $23.5 million, compared with 1997 second quarter revenues of $26.4 million. The company expects to incur a loss in the quarter of $0.12 to $0.14 per share, net of tax, and before an inventory obsolescence charge of between $5 million and $6 million. For the second quarter of 1997, it posted earnings of $0.04 per share. The inventory obsolescence charge results from the introduction of Quickturn's Mercury Design Verification System.

Ikos Systems, Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.) recorded revenues for the third quarter, ended July 4, of $8.5 million. The company expects to take excess inventory and other charges totaling approximately $2.3 million as a result of its product transition. Those measures will result in a net operating loss of $6 million to $7 million, excluding the previously announced Delsoft acquisition charges.

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please email your message to miker@isdmag.com.

integrated system design  September 1998