The Design Automation Conference (DAC), the electronic design automation (EDA) industry’s leading event, today announced that Sir Robin Saxby, executive chairman of ARM, and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of Berkeley, will deliver the keynote addresses for the 40th annual conference. DAC will be held June 2-6, 2003, at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California.

On Tuesday, June 3, Sir Robin Saxby will deliver the opening keynote address titled “Less than 100nm … A Giant Leap for Mankind?” The speech will address the challenges of meeting the new opportunities posed by Moore’s Law during the next few years. In particular, Sir Robin Saxby will discuss the giant leap required in design technologies and tools, the resulting global landscape alteration, emerging applications, and whether or not the industry can take advantage of all available transistors. On Thursday, June 5, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli will present “The Tides of EDA”, his perspective on the cyclical behavior of the EDA industry, technology advances and progress made, and how the EDA and design communities need to collaborate together to contribute toward the electronics industry’s recovery.

“In keeping with DAC’s tradition, this year’s keynote speaker lineup proves to be no exception in the level of quality expected by our conference attendees,” said Ian Getreu, 40th DAC general chair. “We expect attendees to be able to take away solid information that can be applied to current industry challenges and help them drive business decisions during these demanding economic times.”

Sir Robin Saxby was involved in the founding of ARM and served as chairman, president and chief executive officer since joining the company full-time in February 1991. In October 2001, he split the role of chairman and chief executive officer, becoming executive chairman while Warren East took on the role of chief executive officer. Prior to this, he worked for five years for European Silicon Structures SA (ES2), where he was vice-president of Northern Europe, managing director ES2 Limited and president of its USA affiliate US2.

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has been a faculty member since 1976. He is a co-founder of Cadence and Synopsys, the two leading companies in the EDA industry. He is the chief technology advisor of Cadence and sits on its board of directors.

About DAC

DAC is the premier forum for the electronic design industry to exchange information on products, methodologies, and processes. Attended by more than 10,000 developers, designers, researchers, managers and engineers from leading electronics companies and universities around the world, DAC includes more than 150 exhibitors and offers a robust technical program covering the electronics industry’s hottest trends.

HP and Cadence’s efforts are part of a strategy to provide powerful yet economical solutions for customers using the combination of an open-sourced operating system, industry standard 32- and 64-bit systems and market-leading EDA applications.

“Cadence made the decision to extend its current Linux offerings to all integrated circuit solutions based on the reliability and robust platform solutions available from HP running Red Hat Linux,” said Lavi Lev, executive vice president, Cadence IC Solutions Business Unit. “We feel that the platform solutions available now will meet the stringent requirements for reliability and total cost of ownership our customers demand.”

The first applications from Cadence to exploit Linux on Itanium-based platforms will be its family of Physical Verification solutions, which are used in the manufacturing of integrated circuit design. Cadence is the largest supplier of electronic design automation products, methodology services and design services and its solutions are used to accelerate and manage the design of semiconductors, computer systems, networking and telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, and a variety of other electronics-based products.

Verification of System on a Chip (SoC) integration is extremely complex, demanding solutions that can verify billions of interactions. Using Linux as a backdrop, Cadence’s Physical Verification solutions can readily exploit the multi-processor, performance and large memory space available to these systems. Over the course of the next year, Cadence will expand its support for Linux to the Itanium processor family as it ports EDA applications to these powerful platforms.

“HP is a historic leader in the EDA market, holding the top position for EDA systems in the technical systems and servers markets, and the second slot in the overall workstation market,” said Chris Willard, vice president, Workstations and High-Performance Systems program, IDC. “IDC believes that HP’s success in technical markets is due in large part to its ability to field complete, well-integrated solutions and to adapt these solutions to changing customer requirements and environments.

“We see HP’s agreement with Cadence as indicative of the company’s continued success in partnering with key ISVs in technical markets. At the same time, HP’s support of Linux and Intel-based solutions demonstrates the company’s ability to incorporate new technologies into its overall product offering.”

“Since we began our formal relationship with Cadence in July 2000, together we have broken new ground in EDA, emerging from our work in the labs and through the success of our joint customers,” said Martin Fink, general manager, HP Linux Systems Division. “As the No. 1 provider of Linux systems in the world, HP sees the EDA market as a key area that will benefit from the adoption of Linux on x86 and Itanium-based platforms. Cadence was early to recognize opportunities stemming from this shift and we look forward to future milestones we will achieve as part of the expanded relationship.”

EDA allows design engineers to transcend the power and miniaturization limits of integrated circuits used for electronic devices. EDA applications allow engineers to develop and design IC features that are a fraction of the size of a piece of human hair and transform them into a silicon chip. Cadence’s shift to EDA applications on Itanium-based HP workstations and servers running Linux brings IC development to new heights — transforming the power, functionality and size of electronic devices, from digital cameras to supercomputers.

The electronic design automation (EDA) industry has generally not shared in the semiconductor industry’s boom and needs to change from being only a provider of point tools to being a supplier of value-added services for all or part of the design process, EDA CEOs said last week.

Participating in an executive forum at the Design Automation Conference here, the CEOs also saw the industry continuing to advance its technology and finances through acquisitions and partnerships. Some also saw a gradual shift to PC platforms to some extent from the dominant Unix server platforms with the coming Microsoft shipment of Windows 95. The CEOs also believed EDA innovation was limited more by availability of talented people than research investment dollars.

The forum brought into contact the CEOs of the four largest companies: Joseph Costello of Cadence Design Systems; Aart de Geus of Synopsys; Alain Hanover of Viewlogic Systems, and Walden C. Rhines of Mentor Graphics, along with Gerald C. Hsu, CEO of start-up Arc-Sys, and Christine King and Wolfgang Ries, representatives of users IBM and Siemens, respectively. Ronald C. Collett, president of Collett International, was the forum’s chairman.

“There’s a lot more value that can be added by EDA companies if we start changing this model to get out of this point tool, CD-ROM sales mentality. I am not willing to get the same amount of money and work harder for it. I am not pleading poverty; we work our asses off and I don’t think we get much for it. That’s not poverty. We produce more value than we get credit for. I’m not a poverty kind of person,” he said, amid laughter.

“We should be being paid for the value that we provide the customer. To get to that kind of model, you’ve got to get out of the tool-selling phase. I think a fundamental issue is that we have been too focused on technology tools. Technology without process and the people and services to implement that change is the booby prize. It is not enough. We really don’t add any value to the customer base unless we’re changing people’s fundamental way of doing their business and doing their design,” he continued.

‘The way to make the pie bigger is to help us, the end-users and silicon suppliers…make more money. If you can help us make more money, we’re going to have more money to pay you guys.” She added: “As we get into the deep-submicron realm, the physical environment becomes more and more important.”

“It is (also) true that a greater percentage of revenue in the industry today is going for combinations of tools plus services toward integrated solutions providing creation of libraries and infrastructure. The start-ups in the industry, the smaller companies, have been about 50 percent or greater of revenues. For quite some time. they have served as an innovative tool that complements the large companies that typically are providing broader solutions.”

“The EDA industry is not rewarded by volume. It’s rewarded by number of designs. So there’s no direct tie between the success of a customer’s design results and the EDA company’s reward. So there’s lots of interest in trying to tie those two together better to the extent our customers are willing to do so. The profits of EDA are not up anywhere near as much as the profits of our customers. Any way we can tie our success to our customers’ success has got to be good. So we look for opportunities to write contracts, for example, that have incentive payments to us as certain goals are achieved and I think that’s a healthy direction in the industry. I think longer term if we can develop the kind of close relationship required to do leading-edge design, that more and more we’ll be seen as less of a threat” to customer design capability.

It joins five other IEEE societies that form CEDA, which serves as the focal point for IEEE’s multiple EDA disciplines. Societies are the Antennas and Propagation Society, the Circuits and Systems Society, the Computer Society, the Electron Devices Society and the Solid State Circuits Society.

“Design automation is a key technology for the electronics industry and CEDA is providing a useful forum of information exchange for IEEE members who are part of this community,” says Michal Odyniec who heads a Technical Committee on Computer Aided Design within MTT. “It’s for this reason that we have joined forces with the five other IEEE societies to support CEDA and help it realize its charter.”

Adds Dunlop: “We welcome the endorsement of MTT and look to it and the other five IEEE societies for guidance as we set CEDA’s direction.”

About the Council on EDA

The Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) is IEEE’s focal point for multiple EDA disciplines. Its goal is to bring increased value to IEEE members by coordinating EDA activities, enabling new initiatives, fostering interdisciplinary research and recruiting young talent to EDA. It also will increase visibility for IEEE-sponsored EDA events such as the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD) and its technical publications.

Based in Santa Clara, California, Magma Design Automation Inc. develops software that computer chip designers use to produce complex integrated circuits (ICs). ICs are interconnected layers of semiconductors—electronic components etched onto thin silicon chips that direct the passage of electrical current. They are used in computers, as well as a variety of electronic devices. Magma's electronic design automation (EDA) products, which improve chip performance and help manufacturers to get new chips onto the market faster, include Blast Create, Blast Plan, Blast Fusion, and Blast Noise. These applications are used by a number of leading firms within the technology and electronics industries, including Broadcom, NEC Electronics, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba. In addition to its California headquarters, Magma has a number of other U.S. locations, including sites in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Orange County, California; Boston; Austin and Dallas, Texas; Durham, North Carolina; and Newcastle, Washington. Internationally, Magma maintains locations in the United Kingdom, Taiwan, The Netherlands, Korea, Japan, Israel, India, Germany, France, China, and Canada.
Magma was founded by entrepreneur Rajeev Madhavan and three other EDA industry players: Lukas van Ginneken, Hamid Savoj, and Karen Vahtra. With Madhavan at the helm as CEO, the company raised $115 million in venture capital, which was in ample supply at the height of the dot-com craze.

After training at Bell Northern Research in Canada, Madhavan worked for Cadence Design Systems, performing due diligence reviews of companies that Cadence wanted to acquire. While performing this work, Madhavan was inspired to start his own firm. His entrepreneurial run began in 1992, when he played a role in starting LogicVision Inc., a firm that made chip testing tools. Two years later Madhavan started the EDA firm Ambit Design Systems Inc., which was eventually sold to Cadence for $260 million in cash.

Cisco Systems Vice-President Andreas "Andy" Bechtolsheim provided the initial funding to start Magma, which established headquarters in Cupertino, California. This capital was immediately used to develop a product that stood out from the offerings of other industry players. As Magma President and Chief Operating Officer Roy Jewell explained in a November 29, 2005 interview with Chris Hall of DigiTimes.com: "What Rajeev did from Day 1 was establish a world-class R&D team, and our idea was to develop a system, built from the ground up, for IC designs that would incorporate processors at 0.13-micron and below. That meant that, in addition to active circuit components, the system looked at interconnects as an active part of the design and one that also had to be optimized."

In the same interview, Jewell shed some light on the company's strategy for acquiring customers, commenting: "We didn't try to take a shotgun approach in penetrating the market; rather, we tried to select some bigger customers that were right at the sweet spot of our technology. We would have some success with a customer and then build out a much broader business as a result of those successes. We were asked to tackle their hardest designs, the ones that were in trouble, and we went in and solved those problems and got those designs to market. From that success came bigger opportunities for engagement with those customers." Magma's first product, a physical design system called Blast Fusion, hit the market in April 1999—two years after the company was founded. In June the technology giant Intel made an undisclosed investment in Magma, and the firms began working to optimize Magma's products for computer workstations that used Intel's processors. Two months later the company formed Magma KK in Shin-Yokohama, Japan, to serve a growing customer base in that country. Magma ended 1999 by gaining its largest customer to date, Fujitsu Microelectronics Inc., which reported great success in reducing design times with Blast Fusion.

Just as tourists flock to New Orleans to savor the sounds of the Dixieland jazz music and the taste and smell of Cajun cooking, hardware and systems designers are gathering here this week at the 39th Design Automation Conference (DAC). They’re arriving in droves from around the world to learn what’s new and to see what’s on display from more than 225 EDA companies.

This year, DAC is an especially relevant event as electronics companies work to identify the right combination of market insight, strategic execution and breakthrough technology to develop the next big market opportunity. Many hardware and systems designers and their managers believe that the best place to become an expert on design tools and methodologies is at DAC.
It’s been an especially good year for the $4 billion EDA industry. EDA has faired far better than most industries during this recent downturn because, in many ways, its tools and accompanying methodologies are the hub of product development and innovation. Without these tools, for example, the electronics industry would not be able to take advantage of the continuing advances in deep-submicron process technologies. We would be equally hard-pressed to guarantee first-time success or meet time-to-market demands.

EDA is almost assured of ongoing success and Wall Street’s attention if it listens to its customers and responds with the kinds of tools and methodologies designers require. Consequently, the work of this industry is far from over. In fact, challenges abound.
Many hardware and systems designers arriving at DAC this week wonder what will become the next EDA driver. It could come from a variety of different areas. The need is great for managing and partitioning complex SOC designs, speeding up mixed signal design and verification and managing the design of large digital chips at 0.1 micron and below.

DAC’s technical program this year includes papers outlining new developments in t these areas, and the exhibit floor will be full of new EDA tools. The program emphasis is on growing industry concerns: embedded systems, low power, analog and mixed signal, in addition to signal-integrity issues such as inductance and crosstalk.

Embedded Systems is a major thrust this year. As complex SOCs include TP embedded in software, there’s a need to combine the best hardware design tools from EDA companies with the best software design tools from embedded software companies.

Low power is a technology driver, not just for portable designs, but for high-performance design, too. If the industry doesn’t find ways to reduce power in high-performance designs, power dissipation will become a major stumbling block to using technologies below l00nm. It may even become the limiting parameter for Moore’s Law.

Analog and mixed signal is an ongoing concern. Serious challenges to analog designers today include low-supply voltage, signal integrity and a long design/redesign cycle. Substantial improvement in the analog design cycle must be made or it is unlikely that complex mixed signal SOCs will become a reality in the marketplace.

Signal-integrity issues such as inductance and crosstalk are design problems the EDA industry is working to solve. Device and interconnect models keep getting more complex, while the chips keep getting larger, which leads to an explosion in back-end verification times. A new topic designers will hear about at DAC will be integrated package design and physical layout tools, especially for high-speed (GHz) designs.

Wireless systems designers are always looking for opportunities to reduce cost by eliminating off-chip components such as inductors, transformers and filters. RF designers need new tools to enable the accurate modeling and seamless integration of those components.

During DAC this week, many designers will have the opportunity to expand their thinking and discover the best new technology from the EDA industry to enhance their creativity. Those designers who take advantage of these new design automation tools and methodologies will substantially improve their chances of getting a quality product to market on time and within budget. They may, of course, later claim that the inspiration came from the intoxicating strains of Dixieland jazz or the buoyancy of the EDA industry in a down market.

The Riverfront Campus had a very aggressive construction timetable, with only 22 months scheduled from start to finish. Considering that over 1,200 miles of wire needed to be installed for the BAS, card access, intercom, closed circuit television (CCTV), and fire alarm systems, it’s amazing the facility was finished in such a short period of time.

ORIGINAL DESIGN

The Riverfront Campus is a unique development, and the architectural firm that designed the project relied on non-traditional construction methods in order to make sure their vision was achieved. Basically, the project started as more of a concept, rather than firm sets of specifications.
To ensure that vendors were bidding “apples to apples,” a preliminary set of drawings was created, and vendors were asked to bid on the listed quantities and also to give unit prices on additional work and equipment. This arrangement ensured that as the owners’ requirements changed during construction, vendors couldn’t overcharge for change

Once vendors were awarded the job, they were designated as part of the design team. This meant that the contractors, engineers, and subcontractors worked together to determine if a particular design was going to work and, if not, what steps needed to be taken to make it work.

As such an integrated member of the design team, controls contractor Entech Sales and Service, Dallas, TX, had full input into the type of building automation and security systems the new building would need. Entech automation account executive lira Hartman stated that his company was asked to install the “Continuum” BAS from Tour Andover Controls and security systems that included integrated access control, CCTV, digital video management, and intercom system.

“The mechanical engineer specified a BAS that utilized an open architecture, rather than a proprietary one, and the Continuum BACnet system is a 100% open protocol system,” stated Hartman. “It was important for this system to have the capability to interface with third-party equipment such as the chillers, ModBus interface for the VFDs, computer room A/C units, and emergency power systems, as well as the Lutron lighting control system.”

In addition, RadioShack’s previous headquarters utilized an Andover “Infinity” control system, so the company was familiar with the system. “This helped in our decision to use Tour Andover Controls in the new facility. We also knew that Entech had the strength to meet our stringent construction requirements. Along with the mechanical and electrical contractors, they were active participants in the system design from the beginning of the project, and their willingness to work with RadioShack, the consulting engineer, and the general contractor added value to the installation and meeting the timelines of the project,” said Ryan Montgomery, director of facilities for the RadioShack Corporation.

THE HVAC SYSTEM

The three office buildings have chilled water VAV AHUs with VFDs that serve two floors using an underfloor air distribution system. At over 550,000 sq ft, this is one of the largest underfloor air distribution systems in the state. Hartman stated that the underfoor system is beneficial, because it makes it easy to isolate floors that are unoccupied after hours, and it also significantly reduces the amount of ductwork needed.

Fan-powered VAV boxes with electric reheat temper the air, and floor-mounted diffusers distribute the air throughout the floor. Tenants have the ability to adjust the floor-mounted diffusers if the airflow becomes a disturbance.

Since then, Viewlogic Systems has emerged as the third in the broad-line supplier triumvirate through acquisitions and internal development, but it currently has a number of pressing problems these days.

Synopsys seems caught between the two camps: They are evolving through recent acquisitions from a niche vendor to more of a broad-line supplier and could even be characterized as an ASIC vendor now. The company so dominates its original niche, logic synthesis, that it has grown into the third largest vendor in the business.

Dataquest figures put the 1995 year-to-year growth for the big four EDA suppliers at: Synopsys, 35.6 percent; Cadence, 28 percent; Mentor, 3.6 percent; and Viewlogic, off 0.12 percent.

Talks with EDA industry leaders, and some of its top watchers, led to some interesting insights into what may be the most dynamic part of the semiconductor business today. Industry analysts sported a variety of opinions on the current state of EDA broad-line suppliers as opposed to niche providers.
“There are no broad-line suppliers, only large multi-point tool suppliers, but this could change,” said Gary Smith, Dataquest principal analyst. “We are moving into a point tool market where suites of tools like RTL virtual prototype and physical verification are needed. Standard industry practice dictates engineering-driven companies being absorbed before IPO within a three-year timetable. Financially-driven companies go IPO before selling out to get more money, while vision-driven companies just keep growing.”

Mr. Smith’s take on Windows broke it into a “cheap seat” market and a mainstream Windows NT arena, where Windows is making a difference in low-end mainstream, with VeriBest and Antares changing the distribution model through VARs like T.E.A.M.

“Service consulting has always been protection with two applications engineers per each sales engineer. Mentor’s insourcing makes it like a giant design house. Outsourcing only works well in the CAD area because CAD guys are so hard to find. Cadence is doing great now, but we’re in a bubble economy and everybody will need help soon.”

“It’s integration and services; broad-line suppliers are the place you go to get interoperability problems solved,” said Rita Glover, president and principal analyst, EDA Today. “They also provide good services. The service industry is consulting versus support. New technology is absorbed by start-ups; people spin out of companies with new ideas to make bigger financial gains and spend more R&D time. Within two years, they are usually acquired by a big company or go public with an IPO. Then, a big company owns the technology after the acquisition and the cycle restarts itself.”

Ms. Glover says the software distribution model is changing because of Windows, which is expected to cost less and is, in her opinion, as good as or better than Unix. “It won’t sell too cheaply,” she said. “The pressure is for Unix tools to come down in price. I think we’ll see a price parity.”

“It has been clearly demonstrated that no single supplier can provide the best tools in every area, or even be significantly competitive in every area,” said Ronald E. Collett, president, Collett International. “The marketplace, where customers purchased from most of their tools from one vendor, has now recast its model into one in which customers can buy different tools from different companies. Acquisitions confirm this. Technology continues to emanate from small start-ups.”

He sees a natural evolution in software distribution, changing as the market becomes more sophisticated, needing less and less support to use EDA technology. “Leading-edge products will still be distributed by their original vendors,” Mr. Collett said before moving to the topic of Windows versus Unix software. “Assuming an underlying platform parity with equivalent hardware, the price of the software should be independent of the platform, with the price based only on performance of the software. This will happen.”

He concluded by calling service and consulting wholly independent from the EDA tools business, completely different although artificially coupled, adding that he thinks the industry will see a lot more of both.

Cadence views itself as by far the biggest broad line supplier. “But most importantly, we’re trying to change the industry and Cadence,” said Joseph Costello, Cadence’s president and CEO. “The EDA label is a broad brush covering many areas. Cadence’s first approach to doing business was in a very focused, healthy niche. We went for a broad-line set of capabilities when customer problems led us to other parts of the design process and the business model of being just an overgrown tool company quit working. So, we grew into a broad-line player.”

This is not the first time the EDA industry has had a duopoly fighting it off at the top. We can learn from our own history that, in fact, anything close to this model has repeatedly shown its limits and, more importantly, has historically led to periods of dissatisfaction and stifled innovation.
In a small company, everyone is focused on survival–developing and delivering useful, innovative products to customers. This razor-sharp focus to succeed leads to innovation, a dedication to influence the customer methodology, genuine customer partnerships and rapid deployment of the technology among leading edge customers.

Some startups are acquired by the large companies which have found this to be an economical way to stay current on technology. The larger companies wait until the technology leader surfaces from the startup battle and then they acquire it.
However, when a small startup is swallowed by a larger company, the sense of urgency disappears. The product gets diluted in a larger offering, and the ability to cause methodology changes is dramatically reduced. The key people that were driving those changes unfortunately are forced to become inwardly focused and no longer have the fierce competitive drive that keeps them with an eye on what the customer needs and developing the best technology to meet those needs. But the largest barrier to innovation within a large company is not the lack of talented engineers, but rather economics.

It is hard to retain and financially motivate top talent to remain in a large company when going back to the garage has proven to yield them substantial payoffs. And the bundling of large amounts of technology–mixing leading edge products, which require an enormous investment in R&D with cash cows that are basically in maintenance mode–makes it virtually impossible to properly apportion the revenue and hence the R&D focus to the products that require it.

Some companies will eventually grow to become medium-size contenders and perhaps go on to become one of the large companies of tomorrow. The talent, which is slowly drifting from the large companies, creates the next generation of startups, and the cycle continues. This ecosystem–with all its faults–has proven to work and to provide sustained value to our customer base.

The players in the duopoly can harm smaller niche tool vendors in a number of ways. They can undercut prices and use market segments in which they have virtual locks to keep the small vendors out. They can bundle tools and price the bundles attractively, making it difficult for customers to go out and find the best tool for the job. They can degrade the interoperability of their tools with niche tools. They can configure their software to automatically invoke their own product rather than a competing product.

These two monolithic vendors supplying the platforms and offering the majority of tools in the flow will increasingly offer closed systems. The idea in theory is that with the two platforms, you can use either as a base with a number of tools included and add others in. Though they might claim interoperability and open databases, the customer will effectively have to choose to live in one or the other entire system.

With the advent of common process rules and standard libraries, silicon implementation methodologies have become the main competitive advantage between our customers. The step functions in design technologies are being brought to market as we speak by the new players. Some customers may decide to adopt old-fashioned methodologies supplied by the duopoly vendors. The customers that will choose to make methodology an integral part of their strategic focus will understand the dangers the industry is facing. It is likely that they will continue to push forward for their own sake. lathe process, they will contribute to the development of a new, thriving and diverse ecosystem. Nature is trying to tell us something–we’d better listen.

Leading-edge consumer electronics products are driving integrated circuit technology in all dimensions — performance, cost, integration, power consumption, and time-to-market. The analog/RF circuitry in these ICs is both the largest differentiator and the most difficult design challenge in getting them into volume production. Berkeley Design Automation’s Precision Circuit Analysis technology enables designers to rapidly and accurately verify problems that otherwise would be impractical or infeasible. Using this technology, design teams save precious design time, lower risk, and deliver smaller, lower-power silicon.

“We face rapid product development cycles and mass-market cost pressures in the audio, video, home, and wireless consumer products we develop,” said Yoshiyuki Miyabe, Director of Corporate R&D Strategy at Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. “Analog and RF circuits make up a significant portion of the semiconductors in these products. Today’s circuit verification tools are unable to deliver the functionality, speed, and accuracy required for these aggressive consumer electronics designs.”
“After an extensive evaluation, we determined that Berkeley Design Automation’s Precision Circuit Analysis technology presents a strategic competitive advantage to Panasonic and is critical to our success,” added Dilip Sampath, Venture Partner with Panasonic. “We believe in the technology so much that we decided to invest in the company.”

Berkeley Design Automation will use the investment to launch its Precision Circuit Analysis technology. The company entered the market last year with PLL Noise Analyzer(TM) which focused on a narrow, but notoriously difficult problem. Having proven the silicon accuracy, performance, and robustness of its technology on over 75 production designs, the company is readying itself to enter the general market to tackle a wide range of the most difficult analog/RF verification problems.

“We are delighted and honored to have Matsushita Electric Industrial as an investor,” said Ravi Subramanian, CEO at Berkeley Design Automation. “As the world’s largest consumer electronics company, Matsushita deploys some of the world’s most advanced design platforms for consumer electronics IC design. This investment validates not only our technology; it also validates its positive disruptive potential in analog/RF circuit design.”