Synopsys and CoWare tie the knot. Virtual Prototyping on fire!!

Written by Brian Bailey February 08, 2010 Hits: 2411 Favorites

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Boy – What a week for the virtual prototyping market. First, Synopsys acquires VaST, Days later Intel acquires Virtutech through its Wind River division and now today Synopsys has also acquired CoWare. That leaves just Carbon and Imperas without a large partner and Cadence with nothing to offer in this space at the moment.

What is also interesting with this acquisition is the way in which the announcements have happened. Normally you would expect a release from the acquiring company that offers both sides of the picture, but there are two independent releases – one from CoWare that has a CoWare quote and an about CoWare section, and second release from Synopsys that has a quote from them and an about Synopsys.

Synopsys says "System-level design and verification solutions have been gaining traction among developers as chips have gotten more complex and embedded software has become more pervasive," said Joachim Kunkel, senior vice president and general manager of the Solutions Group at Synopsys. "With the completion of the CoWare acquisition, Synopsys will be able to develop and bring new standards-based solutions to market so engineers can more quickly design processor and software-intensive products."

Meanwhile CoWare says “Over the years, CoWare has been one of the innovation leaders addressing the needs of electronic system design. We have developed a significant product offering based on standards-based technologies and solutions that IP, semiconductor and systems companies have successfully deployed,” said Alan Naumann, President and CEO of CoWare. “Synopsys’ acquisition of CoWare confirms the trend of increasing demand for systems design solutions. It also provides our customers continued access to market leading technologies and services with a recognized industry leader.”

So there you have it. Synopsys now has a major integration effort ahead of them in both the ESL space and the DSP tool space.

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Brian Bailey – keeping you covered

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Reviewed by Gary Dare
February 08, 2010

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I just caught your tweet on this, thanks, Brian! So after also taking VaST last week, SNPS has three pieces to put together in virtual prototyping ... the third being Innovator, a relatively new VP/hardware-software co-verification platform.

And thanks for the reminder in your piece about LTE work that CoWare is doing with Xilinx. It's been a while since I've noted that CoWare has SPW (and BoNES), which was acquired by Cadence from Comdisco (a wide span holding company a la Tyco). I can't recall if CoWare purchased rights to that product from Cadence or if CDNS subcontracted CoWare to take charge of it. If CoWare owns it outright, I wonder if SPW and BoNES would be the first tools to hopscotch from one Big 3 EDA firm to another? (Oh, what a great EDA pannel trivia question that would make, like the Political Junkie's weekly question on NPR's Talk Of The Nation!) And if not, how quickly will Cadence pull it back?

And it now makes me wonder ... ARM's SoC Designer, formerly the Axys tool, has Carbon as its home. Will Cadence or Mentor go after it, especially if ARM still owns the technology? (Can tonight's '24' cliff-hanger top that?)

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Brian Bailey