EDA/IP weekly roundup – January 9th 2013

1/9/2013 10:29 AM EST

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

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has announced that SATA Express™, a new specification that standardizes PCI Express® as an interface for client storage, has started the ratification process. The specification has moved into the member review stage, the final step prior to the specification’s release to SATA-IO members. SATA Express will be available to the general public in the next version of the specification, expected to be completed in 2013.

SATA Express enables an ecosystem for client storage in which SATA and PCIe solutions can coexist, providing a low-cost solution to fully utilize the performance of next generation solid state drives (SSDs) and hybrid drives. PCIe technology enables interface speeds of up to 1GB/s per lane in the client space, as compared to today’s SATA technology at 0.6GB/s. Storage devices not requiring the speed of SATA Express will continue to be served by existing SATA technology. The specification will define new SATA Express device connectors and motherboard connectors that will support both new PCIe drives and existing SATA devices. See http://www.sata-io.org/technology/sataexpress.asp for more details.

Mentor Graphics has announced expanded embedded Linux development support for Freescale QorIQ devices with the Mentor® Embedded Linux® and Sourcery™ CodeBench products. Embedded developers can make use of a commercially supported Linux solution that incorporates the recent release of Freescale’s QorIQ software development kits (SDKs) which are compatible with Yocto Project 1.2. The Yocto Project is a Linux Foundation open source initiative that provides standardized tools and resources for custom Linux systems based on any hardware architecture. The Mentor Embedded Linux product tracks and supports the latest versions of the Yocto Project including version 1.2 and version 1.3.

The EDA Consortium (EDAC) Market Statistics Service (MSS) has announced that the EDA industry revenue increased 4.9 percent for Q3 2012 to $1619.9 million, compared to $1543.9 million in Q3 2011. Sequential EDA revenue for Q3 2012 increased 1.7 percent compared to Q2 2012, while the four-quarters moving average, which compares the most recent four quarters to the prior four quarters, increased by 8.8 percent. Companies that were tracked employed 28,877 professionals in Q3 2012, an increase of 6.3 percent compared to the 27,162 people employed in Q3 2011, and up 2.4 percent compared to Q2 2012.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES has announced plans to build a new global R&D facility at its Fab 8 campus in Saratoga County, N.Y. The TDC will feature more than a half million square feet of flexible space to support a range of technology development and manufacturing activities, including cleanroom and laboratory space. Representing an investment of nearly $2 billion, the facility will increase the total capital investment for the Fab 8 campus to more than $8 billion. Construction of the TDC is planned to begin in early 2013 with completion targeted for late 2014.

Oasys Design Systems has announced a new product called RealTime Explorer that identifies and resolves timing, power, area, and routing congestion issues early in the design cycle. Oasys provides a single, integrated physical synthesis platform that allows RTL engineers to accurately identify and resolve top-level timing and routability without relying on physical design groups. RealTime Explorer was developed to eliminate design iterations between front and back-end design groups late in the design cycle and thus reduce time-to-market and improve quality of results (QoR).

IPextreme has announced that Atrenta is the newest member of its Constellations initiative, bringing together like-minded companies to advance the state of the global semiconductor IP ecosystem. Constellations is a collective of independent IP companies collaborating at both the marketing and engineering levels. Companies participating in Constellations offer complementary products; membership is open only to non-competing companies to encourage teamwork. Within Constellations, companies work together and share resources to promote mutual success.