FROM
THE EDITOR
A colleague at Altera sent me an e-mail yesterday on the topic of Synopsys’s acquisition of Synplicity. “Please help us all to understand this deal.” That’s a tall order. It seems to me that Synopsys acquiring Synplicity, or some event like it, is only the next inevitable phase in the lifecycle of an EDA technology and the companies it collects and dispatches along the way – a path as predictable and patient as gravity – exerting its steady, indiscriminate tug…
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Techfocus Media, Inc.
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Synthesis Flows Back to the Sea
Synopsys Buys Synplicity (Kevin Morris)
The sun’s rays beat down on the sea, vaporizing seawater and lifting molecules into the sky. Adiabatic processes work their magic, and soon tiny bits of moisture are carried eastward for their date with landfall. It isn’t clear how long it will take them to complete their round-trip journey back to the ocean, or what they’ll encounter and accomplish along the way.
Graduate student Edward McCluskey sits in his lab at MIT documenting a logic minimization procedure that will give life to the idea of optimizing logic designs in software. It isn’t clear how long it will take for these ideas to morph into the logic synthesis technology that is one of the primary enablers of electronic design in the 21st century. McCluskey has no concept of the long litany of both successful and failed software companies that will be spawned and merged along the path of realizing his vision.
A teenage Ken McElvain stands in his backyard with his dad, blowtorch in hand, cooking TTL components off discarded circuit boards to stuff into wire-wrap sockets. He doesn’t yet know that he’ll later master the nascent art of logic synthesis and, in 1994, will co-found Synplicity, one of the world’s most fascinating software companies selling logic synthesis code he crafted in his back room. [more]
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