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In the News
- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (San Jose, CA) announced plans to launch its Design Services business as a separate company named Tality Corp. As part of the plan, Tality has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering (IPO). Immediately after the IPO, Cadence will continue to own approximately 80 percent of Tality, and Cadence doesn't expect to distribute the remaining shares of Tality to Cadence share
holders at this time. Bob Wiederhold,
formerly senior vice president of Design Services at Cadence, has been named president and CEO of the new company. The company said that this action was intended to bring greater strategic focus to the new design services company, while continuing to leverage Cadence's ability to deliver complete design
solutions to customers, including EDA tools, methodology services and design services. The move comes after hightened speculation among journalists and analysts that Cadence would spin off the successful Design Services.
- Lucent Technologies (Murray Hill, NJ) announced that it would spin off its microelectronics business, which includes the optoelectronics components and integrated
circuits (IC) divisions, into a separate company. The new company, which will be named later, will begin its life as a provider of communications semiconductors with more than $4 billion in
revenues over the last four quarters. Lucent is planning an initial public
offering (IPO) for up to 20 percent of the new company and intends to spin off the remaining shares in a tax-free distribution. The IPO should take place by the end of the first calendar quarter of 2001, and the spinoff should be completed by the summer of 2001. John Dickson, executive vice president and chief executive officer of Lucent's Microelectronics and Communications Technologies group, will lead the effort to form the new company. The senior leadership team for the new public company will be named at a later date. The business, headquartered in Allentown, PA, employs more than 16,000 people in 105 locations worldwide.
- Qualcomm, Inc. (San Diego, CA) announced that it intends to spin off its integrated circuits and system software business (Qualcomm CDMA Technologies). The spin-off company, referred to as Qualcomm Spinco (Spinco), will be named at a later date. Spinco will focus on developing and delivering innovative wireless communications integrated
circuits and system software solutions for the world's handset and infrastructure manufacturers. In addition to further developing its existing businesses,
Qualcomm will focus on developing
and supporting the growth of CDMA
technology and driving the convergence of wireless data applications and Internet access. Qualcomm will assign a portion of its patents to Spinco, without compromising its existing licensing and royalty business. Spinco intends to use its patents to gain access to GSM and other technologies by negotiating cross-licenses.
- Motorola (Schaumburg, IL) announced that the company has acquired Hiware AG, a software development tools vendor based in Basel, Switzerland. Hiware technology and staff will become part of Metrowerks, an Austin, Texas-based, subsidiary of Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS). Hiware is a provider of development tools for the automotive and industrial automation industries, focusing on 8- and 16-bit processor architectures. Hiware tools also support Motorola
32-bit processor architectures. Hiware's thirty-three employees will continue to work out of the Basel office and other locations in Europe.
- Innoveda, Inc. (Marlboro, MA) has signed an agreement with Synopsys, Inc. (Mountain View, CA) in which Synopsys will acquire Innoveda's Virsim electronic design software tool and related assets for a purchase price of U.S. $7 million. Virsim is used as a
debugging and analysis environment with hardware description language
simulators including the Synopsys
VCS Verilog simulator. The purchase is subject to customary closing conditions. Previously, Synopsys licensed Virsim from Innoveda on an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) basis. Innoveda will retain rights to the product source code and plans to integrate the functionality of Virsim with its suite of verification tools. Other Virsim OEM agreements will be transferred to Synopsys. Innoveda
customers who purchased Virsim
bundled with other products from the company will have continued support from Innoveda and will be transitioned to an integrated version of the technology over time. Innoveda will be reducing its revenue targets for the balance of the year by approximately US $1.2 million due to the elimination of revenue from the tool's royalties.
- Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (Singapore) has received the QS-9000 certification for quality for its three fabrication facilities ý Fabs 1, 2, and 3. The designation by the internationally recognized quality system brings all of Chartered's production fabs into certification. Earlier this year, Fab 5, the company's joint-venture with Lucent Microelectronics, also earned QS-9000 certification. Chartered's joint-venture facility with Agilent Technologies, Fab 6, is just beginning production and is expected to gain the QS-9000 certification by year-end. For customers, the
designation is further assurance that strict internationally recognized quality system standards have been attained. The QS-9000 certification extends beyond the fabs to include administrative and support functions, including supply management, customer engineering, R&D, facilities, human resources,
marketing and business development, the company said. Criteria for the
certification include a rigorous four-day audit of all shifts. During this process companies demonstrate that they have implemented an effective quality system.
- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (San Jose, CA) and Hewlett-Packard Company (Palo Alto, CA) announced a business alliance whereby the companies will jointly develop, market, and sell new solutions for the electronic design automation (EDA) market. Under the terms of the agreement, Cadence will adopt HP-UX1 as a preferred product development and support platform and operating system. HP has selected Cadence as a preferred provider of
EDA design tools for HP's R&D groups, including a commitment to Cadence SP&R (synthesis/place-and-route) technology. Cadence will support the HP-UX operating environment on Intel's 64-bit IA-64 architecture, the next-generation microprocessor architecture jointly developed by HP and Intel. To enhance its global verification and quality assurance environment, Cadence will dramatically increase its deployment of HP workstations and servers. Furthermore, Cadence will substantially increase its engineering support for HP by releasing its applications for alpha, beta, and first-customer shipments on HP-UX and HP Precision Architecture (PA) - RISC platforms simultaneously with first-availability on other UNIX platforms. HP will proliferate Cadence's SP&R design tools as well as other Cadence design tools inside its R&D organizations worldwide.
- Ansoft Corp. (Pittsburgh, PA ) announced that it has formed a new company, Altra Broadband, Inc., to pursue the development of critical intellectual property and products for broadband wireless and optical
communications. Altra Broadband will develop components and sub-systems for broadband wireless and optical
networking based on a proprietary new technology, SPWD (Spin Polarized Wave Division). The co-inventors of the SPWD technology, Dr. Lawrence Williams and Mr. P. Premkumar, have been named to lead the new venture. Premkumar was named the president and CEO of Altra Broadband, while Dr. Williams has been appointed as the new company's vice president of Technology. SPWD is a core technology and architecture for multiplexing large amounts of digital data over existing wireless and fiber-optic channels.
Movers and Shakers
- The Design Automation Conference (DAC) executive committee announced the re-naming of two awards to honor
the conference founders and managers, Pat and Marie Pistilli, who announced their retirement in June after 37 years of service. The Advancement of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (ACSEE) Scholarship will be known as the P.O. Pistilli ACSEE Scholarship, and the Women in Design Automation Achievement Award will be named the Marie
Pistilli Women in EDA Achievement Award. The ACSEE Scholarship Program, founded by Pat Pistilli in 1989, assists graduating high school seniors and undergraduate students from under-
represented groups (women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and the physically challenged) who
seek to study computer science and
engineering. The scholarships are awarded annually in $4,000 increments with a maximum of $20,000 per student. For the first time this year, the Women in Design Automation Achievement Award was added as part of the Workshop
for Women in Design Automation. The award recognizes an individual who has developed programs that create opportunities for women in EDA or that advance the awareness of women in the EDA industry.
- Robert Grossman joined EDA supplier Tharas Systems, Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) as vice president of sales. Grossman, who has 25 years of
experience within the semiconductor and EDA industries, with the last 15 years in senior marketing and sales positions, reports to Steve Carlson, chief executive officer of Tharas Systems. He is responsible for establishing the company's worldwide sales channels, along with identifying and managing strategic business
relationships. He was most recently vice president of sales at Vast Systems
Technology. Previously, Grossman was vice president of sales at Eagle Design Automation, now part of Synopsys, and vice president of sales and co-founder of Comdisco Systems, which became the Alta Group at Cadence.
- Actel Corp. (Sunnyvale, CA) appointed Barbara McArthur as vice president of human resources and Dennis Kish as VP of
Marketing. Kish, who joined Actel at the beginning of the year in the newly
created position of strategic marketing vice president, will now direct both strategic marketing and product marketing organizations as a single unit. In a related move, Actel also announced that Dr. Yankin Tanurhan has joined the
company in a newly created position, director of embedded FPGA. Tanurhan will lead Actel's recently announced embedded FPGA intellectual property (IP) effort, charged with developing and
marketing embedded programmable IP cores for system-on-a-chip applications. Prior to joining Actel, Tanurhan was with Synopsys as senior manager of technology partnership programs. He has also held senior consulting, management and research positions with Forschungszentrum Informatik and the Institute of
Computer Aided Circuit Design in Germany. Prior to joining Actel, McArthur was vice president of human resources at Talus Solutions and has held senior human resource positions at Applied Materials, 3Com and Saga Corp.
- Intrinsix Corp. (Westboro, MA), an independent ASIC and system-on-a-chip (SOC) design services company, named Robert J. Richardson to the company's board of directors. Richardson, an electronics industry veteran, recently served as chairman, CEO, and president with Unitrode Corp., a $200 million Power Management Semiconductor Manufacturer. He has also served as a senior management consultant for SRI International and Arthur D. Little, Inc., as well as being a current member of the board of trustees at Southern New Hampshire Medical Center.
Money Bits
Numerical Technologies, Inc. (San Jose, CA) announced financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2000. Numerical reported record revenues of $4.7 million, up 335 percent over the same period last year and up 37 percent from the previous quarter. Excluding non-cash charges associated with acquisition-related costs, deferred stock compensation charges, and depreciation charges, operating loss for the quarter was $1.5 million, compared to a loss of $972,000 over the same period last year and a loss of $2.7 million last quarter. These losses were a result of the company's planned investment in
engineering, marketing, and sales activities needed to meet the semiconductor industry's growing demand for subwavelength design-to-silicon solutions as the industry migrates to semiconductor feature sizes smaller than 0.18 micron, the company said. Also, during the quarter, Numerical successfully completed its initial public offering, which raised more than $80 million in proceeds.
- IKOS Systems, Inc. (Cupertino, CA), a provider of design verification solutions, announced results for the third quarter of fiscal 2000. Revenues for the quarter ended July 1, 2000, grew 23 percent to $18.4 million, compared with $15.0 million for the same quarter of fiscal 1999, the company said. Net income nearly tripled for the quarter to $2.3 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, compared with net income of $784,000, or $0.08 per diluted share, for the same quarter last year, according to the company. Overall product revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2000 were $13.9 million, up 25 percent from $11.1 million last year.
Maintenance revenues increased 17 percent to $4.6 million, up from $3.9 million a year ago. For the first nine months of fiscal 2000, revenues increased 26 percent to $50.7 million, compared with $40.0 million for the nine-month period of
fiscal 1999. Net income for the first nine months of fiscal 2000 was $5.0 million, or $0.52 per diluted share, compared with $1.1 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, for the same period last year.
- Cicada Semiconductor, Inc. (Austin, TX), a provider of silicon solutions for high-speed digital communications, announced the completion of its first round of venture
funding. The company raised $15 million from a group of investors led by Sevin Rosen, and includes ESM Investments, Perot Investments, and Switchcore AB of Lund, Sweden. The funds will be used to expand the company's product development and marketing programs to satisfy demand for Cicada's advanced mixed-signal and digital signal processing (DSP) based transceiver products.
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Integrated System Design
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