In the News

Business and technology news from the semiconductor and design tool industries

Synopsys, Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) has licensed 10 EDA companies to the Synopsys Design Constraints (SDC) format. By joining Synopsys's technology access program (TAP-in), Cypress Semiconductor, Frequency Technology, Logicvision, Monterey Design Systems, Sapphire Design Automation, Silicon Metrics Corp., Sonics, Inc., Tera Systems, and Ultima Interconnect are among the companies that have recently licensed the SDC format.

In Brussels, a new World Semiconductor Council (WSC) was established by adding the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association (TSIA) in 1999. The previous council members included the Electronic Industries Association of Japan (EIAJ), the European Electronic Component Manufacturers Association (EECA), the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association (KSIA), and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). The industry-level agreement was welcomed by the Joint Statement Concerning Semiconductors by the Governments of the United States, Japan, Korea, and the European Communities that was finalized on June 10. The WSC seeks to foster open markets, and to address issues such as standardization, environmental concerns, worker health and safety, protection of intellectual property rights, trade and investment liberalization, and market development. Membership in the WSC is open only to major chip producing countries or regions that have committed to eliminate their semiconductor tariffs. Governments and authorities that support the principles of the Joint Statement, and whose industry associations qualify for membership in the WSC, may become parties to the Joint Statement. The WSC meets annually with the parties to the Joint Statement to discuss these issues.

Intrinsix (Westboro, Mass.) and SEVA Technologies (Fremont, Calif.) announced the signing of a definitive agreement to merge companies. The merger will take effect June 30th, and over the following six months the two companies will combine their operations. Financial details of the merger will not be disclosed. SEVA, with 15 people in Fremont and San Diego, will operate during that period as SEVA Technologies--an Intrinsix Corp. subsidiary. Intrinsix Corp., with 185 employees in 16 U.S. markets, will integrate its California team of 22 with the SEVA team.

The respective boards of the Taiwan companies in the UMC Group unanimously approved merging three joint-venture companies and one publicly traded entity into the United Microelectronic Corp. (UMC). This board action is the beginning of the formal process in which United Semiconductor Corp. (USC), United Integrated Circuits Corp. (UICC), United Silicon Inc. (USIC), and UTEK Semiconductor Corp. (UTEK) will be merged into United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC). The corporate status of Nippon Foundry, Inc. (NFI), the newest joint-venture member of UMC Group and the first pure-play foundry in Japan, is unchanged by the reorganization. It will retain its status as a member of UMC group and as a publicly-traded company in Japan. This will also bring UMC group's total capacity to more than 2.4 million 8-inch equivalent wafers in the year 2000. Fifty percent of this capacity will be comprised of 0.25/0.18-µm capacity. Along with capacity expansion, this change will also accelerate the foundry process technology rollout for 0.15- and 0.13-µm technologies. The three affected joint ventures (USC, UICC, USIC) are privately-held companies.

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (San Jose) and Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.) agreed on a settlement of the patent infringement action pending in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon. This action alleged that Mentor Graphics' Simexpress product infringed patents held by Quickturn Design Systems, a Cadence company. In their settlement, the parties agreed that the District Court in Portland would enter a judgment declaring that Quickturn's U.S. patent numbers: 5,036,473; 5,329,470; 5,448,496; 5,452,231; and 5,477,475 are valid, enforceable, and were infringed by Mentor's sale of Simexpress products in the United States. Mentor is permanently enjoined from producing, marketing, or selling Simexpress emulation systems in the United States. The judgment and the injunction are not effective and may not be used outside the United States.

Axis Systems, Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) announced that it has signed an agreement with Marubeni Solutions Corp. (MSOL) of Tokyo. The agreement allows MSOL to act on Axis Systems' behalf in selling and supporting Axis' system-on-a-chip (SOC) design verification family, Xcite, in the Japanese marketplace. Hitachi Ltd, will be the first Axis customer in Japan supported by MSOL.

BTA Technology, Inc. (San Jose) has relocated its corporate headquarters to a new site. The new 15,000-foot facility located at 1982A Zanker Rd. in San Jose will house close to 100 employees, and an advanced technology characterization laboratory.

Altera Corp. (San Jose) has acquired privately-held Boulder Creek Engineering (Santa Cruz, Calif.), an EDA company and co-developer of the Signaltap logic analysis tool. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Altius Solutions, Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) announced its entry into the hard IP reuse and systems-on-a-chip (SOC) design markets. Altius will develop new EDA tools to characterize, verify, and optimize the timing and power of large hard IP blocks.

Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (Camarillo, Calif.) opened two European subsidiaries, Vitesse Semiconductor Gmbh (Munich) and Vitesse Semiconductor, S.r.l. (Milan). Both offices have been directed to pursue sales throughout Europe in the telecommunications and data communications markets. Harald King, Ph.D., sales manager, will head Vitesse Semiconductor Gmbh for Central Europe, including the Scandinavian countries. Vitesse Semiconductor, S.r.l. will be headed by Guido Carasso MSc CS, Vitesse's sales manager for Western Europe, including the United Kingdom and Israel. Vitesse's current European sales representatives include Broadband Technology 2000 GmbH in Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany; Broadband Technology 2000 Ltd . in the United Kingdom and Ireland; Misil Technologies in Belgium and France; UR S.r.l. in Italy; and UR S.A . in Spain and Portugal.

Cadabra Design Automation Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) announced the launch of Alliance, its EDA partnership program. Charter members include five EDA companies: Library Technologies, Inc., OEA International, Silicon Metrics Corp., Silvaco International, and Synopsys, Inc. The goal of the Cadabra Alliance partnership program is to promote interoperability between EDA tools used in library design and development. Cadabra Alliance EDA partners provide extraction, characterization, and circuit simulation tools. The Alliance flow creates complete cell libraries needed to design with standard EDA tools. Starting from a schematic transistor netlist, standard cell layouts are created and are used to qualify and evaluate a candidate EDA tool.

Cirrus Logic, Inc. (Fremont, Calif.) signed an agreement with IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) to restructure their Micrus joint venture, a wafer fabrication facility based in East Fishkill, N.Y. Upon closing of this agreement, Cirrus Logic's capacity obligations in Micrus will be resized to meet current business needs, and IBM will assume full control of the joint venture. Cirrus Logic's reduced capacity obligations will continue through December 31, 2000. Upon closing of this agreement, Cirrus Logic will take a one-time restructuring charge in the current fiscal quarter, which ends June 26, 1999.

Micro Magic, Inc. (MMI) of Sunnyvale, Calif. announced a strategic partnership with IC products distributor, The Shearwater Group, Inc. (Orcas, Wash.). Shearwater will provide worldwide distribution and technical support of MMI's advanced software applications for system-on-a-chip (SOC) design. MMI provides EDA software and services for the design of high-speed digital ICs. The Shearwater Group, Inc. is a worldwide distributor of hardware and software for the design and manufacture of ICs.

Atmel Corp. (San Jose) and Mixed Mode Design GmbH (Munich) announced the establishment of Mixed Mode Design as Atmel's south-German FPGA design center. Mixed Mode will provide system level design services and technical support for Atmel's AT40K and AT6000 FPGAs. Mixed Mode Design is Atmel's ninth worldwide and second German design center. Mixed Mode Design provides software and hardware design consulting services for systems, ASIC, FPGA, and PCB. Founded in 1988, Mixed Mode Design has 16 hardware and 12 software engineers.

Movers and Shakers

Questlink Technology, Inc. (Austin) has named Dr. Steven Crowl its chief information officer and vice president of Information Technology.

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (San Jose) selected Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli to the position of chief technology advisor (CTA). A professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli will advise Cadence on technology strategy across the company's software product and methodology services businesses, as well as its design realization and electronics infusion service offerings. Aside from his role as CTA, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, a Cadence co-founder, will continue to be a member of the Cadence Board of Directors.

TransEDA (Los Gatos, Calif.) has named Ellis Smith president and CEO, responsible for TransEDA's worldwide operations. Founder, former president and CEO James Douglas will remain a member of the board of directors.

Sonics, Inc. (Mountain View) hired James E. Fleury as senior vice president of marketing and sales.

Phoenix Technologies Ltd. (San Jose) promoted William E. Meyer to the position of chief financial officer. The company also announced four additional promotions and appointments at the senior management level. David Everett will be the vice president and general manager of the platform-enabling group and rejoins Phoenix holding responsibility for the Phoenix-BIOS business. Barry Hoberman is the newly appointed vice president of the semiconductor IP division and has responsibility for the strategic and operational management of the division. Mark McMillan is the newly appointed vice president and general manager of North America operations. McMillan is responsible for managing the company's sales and deployment engineering in North America. Rhod Williams is the newly appointed vice president of strategic firmware technologies and is responsible for setting the strategic direction for the company's firmware-based enabling technologies.

Jacob Greidinger has been promoted to chief technology officer (CTO) and executive vice president at Aristo Technology (Cupertino, Calif.) as part of several promotions intended to expand Aristo's executive team. As CTO, he will be responsible for both the development and the implementation of Aristo's strategic technology. Stephen Sample has been hired as vice president of Engineering. Charles Schadewitz, has been hired as vice president of Sales. He will be responsible for establishing Aristo's worldwide sales, support, and distribution channels.

Money Bits

As reported by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), worldwide sales of semiconductors were $11.21 billion in April. This figure is up 7.3 percent from 1998 April totals. On June 8th, the SIA released its 1999 Mid-year Industry Forecast. The forecast predicted that the overall growth of the semiconductor industry is expected to continue to exceed the 1999 sales for the next three years. The Global Sales Report (GSR) showed slight increases in most markets from April 1998 to April 1999. Chip sales in the Americas improved 0.5 percent from last month and Japan sales increased 0.7 percent. The Asia Pacific market posted a 2.1 percent increase in sales from last year. Europe, however, resulted with sales decreasing 1.8 percent from last month. The SIA's Global Sales Report (GSR) is a three-month rolling average of sales activity. The GSR is tabulated by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization, which represents 70 companies.

Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) of Mountain View, Calif. reported that North American-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted a four percent month-over-month increase in bookings worldwide in May 1999 to $1.43 billion. The North American semiconductor equipment industry posted a book-to-bill ratio of 1.24 for May 1999. A book-to-bill of 1.24 means $124 in orders were received for each $100 worth of products shipped. The SEMI book-to-bill is a ratio of three-month moving average bookings to three-month moving average shipments for the North American semiconductor equipment industry.

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