EDA/IP weekly roundup – November 21st

11/21/2012 10:35 AM EST

This is a roundup of news or activities in the past few days that may be of interest to people.

Advantest Corporation has developed a new EB (electron beam) lithography system, the F7000, with superior resolution performance meeting the requirements for 1Xnm technology nodes. The F7000 supports substrates of diverse materials, sizes, and shapes, including nanoimprint templates as well as wafers.

Advantest has also announced a new mask defect review tool, the Mask DR-SEM E5610, for reviewing and classifying ultra-small defects in photomask blanks. It features a newly developed beam tilt mechanism that enables scanning at oblique angles.

Mentor Graphics has announced its Mentor® Embedded Nucleus® Innovate Program designed to help businesses with less than $1M in annual revenue kick start their embedded development projects. Qualified companies can accelerate their embedded system development with software provided at no cost, including the Nucleus Real Time Operating System (RTOS), the popular Sourcery™ CodeBench GNU toolchain, and an ARM-based board support package (BSP) supporting Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) Stellaris ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. Details on qualification and the software provided through the Nucleus Innovate Program is available at http://go.mentor.com/innovate.

Agilent Technologies has shipped EMPro 2012, its 3-D electromagnetic simulation software. EMPro 2012 allows designers to more easily create 3-D models and analyze the electrical performance of packages, connectors, antennas, and other RF and high-speed components. Enhancements include a better integration between EMPro and Advanced Design System, low-frequency analysis algorithm that enables stable, accurate results down to very low frequencies and faster Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations.

Newark element14 has expanded its Dev Kit HQ with a ‘quick find’ online product selector designed to help engineers source the latest products available by manufacturer and technology application. Within Dev Kit HQ, engineers have a wide, in-stock selection of the most requested and latest technologies from leading suppliers such as ADI, ARM, Atmel, Freescale, Linear Technologies, Microchip, NXP, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments. New releases are continuously added such as the STM32F4 Discovery Board from STMicroelectronics and the NXP LPC4357-EVB Board.

ARM has announced availability of a rapid prototyping developer kit for the Internet of Things (IoT) market that integrates the Sprint Mobile Broadband USB 598U Modem by Sierra Wireless with the mbed microcontroller development platform, which is based on the ARM® Cortex™-M3 processor.

Mentor Graphics has announced a GENIVI 3.0 specification-compliant Linux®- based Infotainment (IVI) product. New features in the Embedded Infotainment solution that meet the GENIVI 3.0 specification include: An updated Linux kernel, additional Bluetooth components, including hands-free and phone book, the Node Startup Controller which enables the Infotainment Systems function to return to a last known state on power-up, updated versions of systemd, an emerging technology for improving startup efficiency and control, AF_BUS patches to the Linux Kernel and dbus for improved performance on D-Bus Inter-Process and updated packages including Bluetooth, Internet Connection Management, and Sound Server.

Sonics is participating in TSMC's Soft IP Kit 2.0 beta test, part of the TSMC Soft-IP9000 Quality Assessment program. The Soft IP Kit 2.0 represents an enhanced set of checks that build upon TSMC's existing Soft IP Kit, improving kit setup and flow execution while implementing more rigorous checks to ensure the highest quality IP. These improvements include advance lint checks along with additional physical implementation aspects of the design, such as area, timing and congestion.

United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) has introduced an 80nm SDDI (Small-panel Display Driver IC) foundry process. The low power SRAM solution applies foundry design rules to shrink the bitcell size down to 0.714 um2 to enable HD720/WXGA smartphone resolutions, far less than the typical 0.81um2 size used in current 80nm SDDI processes. The process is ready for mass production, with several Tier-1 customers engaged for HD720/WXGA smartphone resolution applications.

IC Insights says that throughout 2012, the expectations for global economic growth have consistently deteriorated.  Global GDP growth is now expected to expand by an estimated 2.6% in 2012, very close to the global recession threshold of 2.5% and well below the long-term average growth rate of 3.5%. However, the forecast for worldwide GDP in 2013 is 3.2% growth. Though better than 2012, this would still be 0.3 points below the long-term average growth rate.  With one month remaining in 2012, there are hints that the economies in China and the U.S. are improving, including stronger housing demand and hiring in the U.S., and accelerating factory output and retail sales in China.