I can't keep up with the myriad acquisitions that are taking place in Virtual Platform space at the moment, and this latest "hot-off-the-press" snippet of news has fair taken my breath away.

Funnily enough, just this morning, Simon Davidmann (President and CEO of Imperas – www.imperas.com) emailed me saying "Hi Max, I was wondering what your take was on the VaST and Virtutech thing... this means that now it is just Imperas/OVP and CoWare left as independents."

I just emailed him back with the message: "You were saying..."

So here's the deal. A few weeks ago there were five independent major players in Virtual Platform space: Carbon, CoWare, Imperas/OVP, VaST, and Virtutech. Last week, Wind River acquired Virtutech (about six months ago, Wind River were themselves acquired by Intel ... you can see why this gets so confusing).

On February 2nd, Synopsys announced that they had acquired VaST. Now, just six days later they have announced that they are also acquiring CoWare.

Wow! This is really surprising. The folks at Magma tend not to worry about anything more abstract than RTL, so they could probably care less. The guys and gals at Mentor have their Vista product and also their domain-specific stuff for automotive.

But what about Cadence? They were big chums with the folks at CoWare ... with this announcement they are essentially left without any solution in this space ... which brings us back to the two independents who remain standing Imperas/OVP and Carbon ... I wonder if the folks at Cadence are starting to ponder their next move... watch this space...

Also watch out for some in-depth analysis from our very own Brian Bailey in the TechBites ESL and Verification communities.