One of my favorite activities at the Design Automation Conference is to wander the aisles looking for EDA startups I hadn't heard of before. There were fewer at last month's DAC than in previous years, but I did find a few that look interesting.

I had previously come across Golden Gate Technology (www.ggtcorp.com), because it had a small booth at last year's DAC, but I hadn't heard about any product plans until this year's conference. Golden Gate rolled out GoPower, a low-power layout solution that appears to include just about everything except routing.

In2Fab Technology (www.in2fab.com), a British design services company, was showing "interconnect-specific incremental synthesis" technology for IC layout migration and leakage-current reduction. Jeda Technologies (www.jedatechnologies.com) is building a commercial verification environment around the open-source Jeda verification language.

An unusual business model comes from SynApps (www.synapps

corp.com), which helps companies develop, deploy and integrate in-house EDA software. The startup claims expertise in static timing analysis, delay calculation, synthesis, placement, clock tree insertion, simulation and timing closure.

MicroEDA Corp. (www.MicroEDA.com) launched an EDA data exchange software package at DAC. It includes a link between the Milkyway and OpenAccess databases. Finally, Hardi Electronics AB (www.hardi.se) was at the DATE conference in Europe this spring, but this Swedish company, which offers rapid ASIC prototyping tools, made its U.S. debut at DAC.

In these challenging times, it's encouraging to find small, engineering-oriented startups with new ideas. As always, there is no way to know how viable those ideas are until real products have been in use for a while. But at least we know the EDA industry is still vibrant, alive and growing.

http://www.eet.com