A look back on 2012: Business successes

12/12/2012 11:13 AM EST

It seems as if 2012 was a good year for almost all of the respondents of my 2012 survey and many of them have some good news to share. Please remember that these are all pieces taken from the responses and I have tried to fit them into the section that made the most sense to me. Coming up in future pieces are sections about technology specifics

Mike Gianfagna - Vice President of Corporate Marketing, Atrenta Inc.

Atrenta continued to enjoy double-digit growth this year. Uptake of our early analysis platform is increasing on all fronts, thanks to complexity trends and the difficulty of designing in advanced nodes. We re-branded Atrenta as "the SpyGlass Company" this year. The identity seems to resonate well with our customers, so we're happy with the result (re-branding is a lot of work - it's nice when it actually moves the needle).

Bill Neifert - Chief Technology Officer, Carbon Design Systems

I think of 2012 as a noteworthy year for Carbon Design Systems, as we celebrated our 10th anniversary, an unusual phenomenon for the electronics, IP or EDA industry. We started the year by announcing 2011 was our fifth consecutive year of growth driven by adoption of our virtual prototyping solutions.

Carbon opened an office in Austin in October to have a strategic presence in a region known for complex SoC designs for wireless, networking and consumer electronics applications.

What may have surprised the industry is our announcement in September that we received $4 million in investment funding from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation and entered into a strategic partnership with Samsung. A Samsung executive was quoted as saying, “Carbon’s technology helps Samsung’s development of leading-edge consumer devices,” something we’re quite proud of.

Dr. Raik Brinkmann - President and Chief Executive Officer - OneSpin Solutions

OneSpin Solutions took a lower profile mid-year 2012 and was rewarded with the opportunity to reassess the verification space. And, reassess we did. What surprised us is the lack of EDA innovation in the area of formal verification. Design teams need formal verification more than ever, but not just logic equivalence checking or signal-level, assertion-based verification. Consider coverage tools for simulation that are able to analyze what’s exercised when inputs are changed. In formal verification, coverage is important, too. Design teams need tools to better observe that what they’ve done is sufficient. Right now, they’re getting an incomplete picture.

Oz Levia -  Vice President of Marketing and Business Development and Corporate Counsel, Jasper Design Automation

In 2011 and 2012, Jasper saw stability and modest growth in the EDA industry. This included sustained profitability, sustained growth overall, particularly in major accounts and with new customer wins, we expanded into new and emerging verification areas, providing users with the ability to apply formal methods to even more verification challenges and domains and the industry has validated Jasper's business model by adopting the new Apps product packaging.

Bob Smith - Senior Vice President of Marketing, Uniquify Inc.

Most companies in the semiconductor industry will purport to have had a great 2012. For Uniquify, we had a great 2012 and can prove it. In fact, 2012 was a pivotal year for us, filled with much success. As we close out the year, everyone at Uniquify can look back with satisfaction on a series of accomplishments because business is expanding in all areas, including design services, manufacturing services and intellectual property (IP).

First, we’re hiring engineers with logic design, design for test (DFT), physical design, and analog design experience, as well as new college graduates. To accommodate our growth, we moved from Santa Clara, to San Jose, Calif., tripling our corporate headquarters space.

Mid-year, we launched ideas2silicon, a comprehensive design services platform that spans chip specification and design through volume delivery of packaged and tested parts for ASICs and SoCs. It offers faster turnaround due to Perseus, a proven proprietary design framework that offers disciplined project management methodology.

Shiv Sikand - co-founder and vice president, engineering, IC Manage

IC Manage enhanced the bug dependency management functionality of its IP Central IP reuse platform. We also announced our IC Manages Views,  a version aware, virtual file system that delivers reduced disk space usage and ‘Zero-Time Sync’ to local and remote sites. IC Manage Views also accelerates EDA tools by utilizing local storage for reads, and network storage for writes.

Rick Stanton - Director of ENOVIA Strategy for Semiconductor and ALM Experiences, Dassault Systèmes

At the end of 2011, Dassault Systèmes announced that it was transforming its company to be unique within the industry. Our mission was to provide a "social, industry experience" for our customers. The transformation would impact everything at 3DS...from our internal organizations through how our products were developed...from how we worked with each other to, how we worked with our customers.

We saw that our users were communities of people within and across industries that needed to collaborate across the traditional boundaries, in order to drive innovation. Above all, we saw that people don't just buy tools and functions, but the full experience that best fits their needs and goals.  In 2012, 3DS put that plan into action.

Industry teams were formed to define and deliver new industry experiences to the market. Internal processes were aligned to support this transformation. And the first releases of these experiences have been adopted by customers in many industries. At our recently completed 3DEXPERIENCE FORUM, we announced some of these and shared some of the progress with our customers.

Our "Silicon Thinking" experience for semiconductor companies has a number of key value components, including new offers for Product Configuration and Lifecycle Management that will drive benefits from tape-out to manufacturing, and Simulation Lifecycle Management that will provide benefits in technology characterization and compliance initiatives.

Brett Cline - Vice President of Marketing and Sales, Forte Design Systems

Forte’s major accomplishment in 2012 comes by way of Gary Smith EDA. His research shows that Forte’s Cynthesizer has the leading market share for high-level synthesis (HLS) software market segment.

The U.S. is Forte’s fastest growing region, perhaps a surprise to EETimes readers. U.S. project teams are using HLS for the design of custom processors, and wired and wireless communication devices, network switches, and much more. Korea and Japan are design centers where our HLS software is in use for all kinds of applications as well. This is probably less surprising since it’s well known that Asia adopted a HLS methodology ahead of other regions, willing to make a huge investment in a methodology shift.

Chi-Ping Hsu, Senior VP, R&D, Silicon Realization Group, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.

As a company, we continued to strengthen our technologies, our relationships, and our business despite global economic issues.  From the challenging position we faced a few years ago, when some predicted our demise, Cadence has returned to an acknowledged leadership role in key technology areas like 20nm/14nm and 3D-IC, as well as strong performance in key business metrics. Clear vision, careful focus, consistent execution and some brilliant innovation have led the company back, and we are optimistic about the future of EDA and Cadence.

Dr. Jason Xing - Vice President of Engineering, ICScape Inc.

ICScape had a very successful first year of public existence.  Coming out of our first DAC, we’re greatly expanding our Field Applications organization to respond to opportunities with current customers and prospects.  We have increased adoption at current customer sites and are actively adding new customers to our customer base. As a result of our showing at DAC and our field applications, sales and marketing efforts, we expect to finish the year well and kick start next year on a very high note.

John Chilton - senior vice president, marketing and strategic development, Synopsys

Synopsys achieved many milestones in 2012 and was successful in its most important goal: to move forward engineers’ ability to design some of the most advanced products the world has ever seen, even amidst accelerating time-to-market schedules and often conflicting power and performance requirements. We did this several important ways. First and foremost, our teams continued to collaborate deeply with design teams to complete many critical tapeouts, particularly at 20 nanometers. Second, we fostered exploration into the mainstream as a methodology. Our DC Explorer synthesis tool runs extremely fast and outputs a valid netlist even in the presence of incomplete or “dirty” data.  This capability allows designers to concentrate on the design itself before optimizing the implementation. Third, we introduced hybrid prototyping, offering the best of both worlds to designers by seamlessly linking virtual and FPGA-based prototypes. Hybrid prototyping has many benefits, including that designers can now start multi-core SoC prototyping earlier – and therefore software development and HW/SW integration earlier – with directly connected real-world hardware interfaces.  Fourth, we created the necessary software, IP, and support skills to help several design teams tape out their first FinFET designs.  Finally, we continued to invest in the broad range of Synopsys tools to keep up with the ever-demanding nature of advanced design. Synopsys remains the company customers and partners can count on to help accelerate their innovation.

Other parts of this series