Mentor Graphics acquires FPGA prototyping company Flexras Technologies
Date: 16/01/2015
The market for the prototyping systems has seen significant growth in last few years due to the requirement in parallel development of software and other applications before the hardware or semiconductor device comes out of the chip fab/or the factory. With the growth in demand for wearable and IoT enabled products, pressure is even more intensified to develop the devices faster.
World's number one EDA company Synopsys leading in this technology of providing prototypes to electronics design engineers. Another leading EDA vendor Mentor Graphics is also focusing more on this prototyping products market. To grow faster in prototype product market, Mentor Graphics has now acquired FPGA prototyping technology expert Flexras Technologies, which develops products for prototyping, validation, and debug of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) and systems on chip (SoCs).Flexras Technologies was started at the University of Pierre et Marie Curie and LIP6 Lab.
Flexras's popular product is called "Wasga Compiler", a timing-driven, multi-FPGA partitioning software for ASIC and SoC prototyping. Wasga offers 10X clock frequency increase, handles multi-billion ASIC gates equivalents designs, and maps them to any Altera or Xilinx board, whether it’s off-the-shelf or custom.
Wasga Compiler automatically partitions large designs onto multiple FPGAs and solves hardware/software validation bottlenecks of complex SoCs.
The VLSI design community who are presently using Wasga Compiler, may have to wait and see if Mentor Graphics offers Wasga Compiler as stand-alone product or integrate into Mentor's other prototyping tools.
VLSI chip design industry looks to be facing data interface/flow issues when the software tool they are using is acquired and integrated into another bigger company's platform.
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N
