Cadence gains steep share in Silicon IP by agreeing to acquire Tensilica

While the semiconductor industry is becoming not so attractive business, one area in semiconductor industry showing good growth is Silicon IP business. EDA software players are increasingly concentrating on IP business because it’s easy for them to sell IP along with chip design software. The VLSI design software with the ready verified IP gives exponential benefit to its customer both by the reliability and time-to-design. Number-one EDA vendor Synopsys is now world’s second IP company after ARM. The 2nd biggest EDA vendor Cadence has started its effort to grow its IP business. It has recently acquired a well doing Indian analog and mixed signal IP company Cosmic Circuits, and has now agreed with Tensilica to acquire it. To this writer both the senior executives of Synopsys and Cadence have said they are not going to compete with ARM, that means they are not going to launch any processor IP competing with ARM. While in the rest of the areas both Synopsys and Cadence wanto have big pie and that’s happening. In this case of Cadence acquiring Tensilica, Cadence has entered processor domain. However it may not be a direct competition with ARM but is a closely related domain. With the growing big-data, mostly the processors do 90%+ of the time data processing and rest in controlling. With increasing high-definition audio/video the big-data processing challenges to gr...