Seems like many of the EDA stories EE Times has written during the past two months have been about startups. There's quite a crop of them this fall. This activity is a good sign for an industry that's just emerging from a period of declining revenues.

Among the startups is Carbon Design Systems (www.carbondesignsystems.com), which said it will offer a "pre-silicon validation suite" by year's end. It will create Verilog-based transaction models that can be read by software development tools.

Also looking at hardware/software co-design is Impulse Accelerated Technologies (www.impulseC.com), which is preparing tools for FPGA designers who work with processor cores.

Giga Scale IC (www.gigaic.com) spun out of InTime Software and announced Time Architect, an electronic system-level design virtual-prototyping tool. Rather than generate code, it replaces the Excel-based chip estimators used by most IC design companies. Another new ESL company is Mirabilis Design (www.mirabilisdesign.com), with VisualSim, a tool for performance analysis and architectural exploration. Based on the Ptolemy simulation kernel, it melds DSP, analog, protocol and digital simulations.

Scotland-based RLCsim (www.rlcsim.com), launched by engineer Donald Bennett, plans to market a power grid planning tool.

Praesagus (www.praesagus.com) is targeting a narrow but key niche-tools that will help sub-100-nanometer IC designers predict thickness variations in copper interconnect, and understand the impact on timing. Another design-for-manufacturability (DFM) startup, MicroEDA (www.microeda.com), promises software that lets chip designers create mask data from design databases.

In other recent startup news, Jeda Technologies (www.jedatechnologies.com) donated its object-oriented Jeda language technology to the IEEE 1364 working group for possible use in Verilog 2005. And Cadence Design Systems teamed with signal-integrity startup Optimal (www.optimalcorp.com) on an IC packaging solution.

Looking over the above list, it's clear that ESL, including co-design, is a hot area for new companies. There are also a couple of DFM startups, and I've heard more are on the way. These are the companies working on the frontiers of EDA.

Richard Goering is managing editor of Design Automation for EE Times.