Cadence Buys Altos Design
By Ed Sperling
Cadence acquired Altos Design Systems, pushing further into IP characterization for power, timing and noise and laying another foundation stone in its IP integration strategy.
“This allows us to more tightly link implementation with models for timing and power,” said John Pierce, director of product marketing for custom simulation at Cadence. “Big SoC customers are pouring an enormous amount of energy into re-characterization. If they lower the voltage, will it still meet performance? And what happens if you use standard IP on different power domains?”
These kinds of tradeoffs are becoming critical in complex SoCs to meet power and performance budgets. But understanding tradeoffs of hundreds of blocks using hundreds of millions of gates is a lot different than making tradeoffs with a dozen blocks. Having IP that is pre-characterized is a first step in reducing the headaches.
“As the process shrinks the variation increases,” Pierce said. “Companies are re-characterizing at different process/voltage/temperature (PVT) ratios.
The Altos tools work primarily at the implementation level. The next challenge will be to provide some of those same capabilities at the architectural level where making tradeoffs can save even more time—and headaches—providing the details are accurate. Cadence executives declined to talk about whether that kind of capability will be added.
Gary Smith, of Gary Smith EDA, said this is “a good acquisition.” He noted that Altos is one of the top modeling vendors, particularly in variability modeling. “This will be key to 35nm-and-below designs.”
This is Cadence’s second major acquisition in less than a year. It bought Denali Software in June 2010 just after announcing EDA360, which in is aimed at shifting at least some of the design process to software-first instead of hardware-first. An initial objective in the blueprint was easier integration of third-party IP, but increasingly Cadence has focused on ways to integrate its own IP more effectively. The Altos acquisition is a further step in that direction.
Cadence did not say how much it paid for Altos.
Tags: Altos Design Automation, Cadence, EDA360