Q: Could you tell us what kind of work you would be doing in these new sctors?
A: Let us take the automotive sector. Movement towards autonomous driving vehicles, along with the need for increased performance, efficiency and safety are driving tremendous change in the industry. Supporting real-time data processing for sensors, cameras etc, to enable sensor-fusion for safety critical-systems is a key requirement and our Tensilica image and video processing enables that. A recent example is the Tensilica usage in an NXP chipset for enabling vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Automotive Ethernet enables high-speed communication between cameras, electonic control units (ECUs) and other advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) and we offer Ethernet media access control (MAC) IP and associated verification IP as well. Also for functional safety, our Incisive simulator provides capabilities to support compliance to the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 26262 standard.
Domains such as automotive, medical electronics, the Internet of Things (IoT), are heavily mixed-signal oriented and Cadence’s strong mixed-signal design and verification tool and IP portfolio helps us target these sectors.
Q: Could you tell us about your latest products?
A: On the digital front , we have introduced several new, highly-innovative products over the past couple of years. We have Tempus for timing signoff, Voltus for power signoff and Quantus for fast, high-fidelity resistor-capacitor parameters (RC) extraction. Innovus, our next generation place-and-route tool was launched earlier this year and has strong momentum, with customers such as Qualcomm Technologies, Nvidia, ST, Juniper and ARM endorsing it. And Genus, our next-generation physically-aware synthesis solution was launched last quarter. We have common engines, database and user-interfaces across these tools and when they work together, there is better predictability, efficiency and productivity. The number of iterations of the design reduces as each stage is aware of what can be expected next and we can arrive at a better answer, faster.
Verification is an extremely critical challenge for our customers, as the cost of failure is too high – re-spins are not just expensive in terms of cost, but the market window may be compromised as well. Our system development suite verification platform comprises of several solutions offered with a metric-driven methodology approach that enables tracking to the verification plan and improves quality convergence, enabling a faster time-to-market. With the acquisition of Jasper and integration of formal analysis into our tools, we are strengthening our portfolio and it will be further augmented by our next-generation emulation platform, which will be shipping later this year. We also have a new high-level synthesis solution called Stratus and we recently introduced the Indago Debug Analzyer, which accelerates the critical root-cause analysis process for debugging. There is also Perspec for system-level verification and this uses specific software use-case directed testing to guide verification.
We are also working on developing sophisticated packaging techniques and interconnects. With bendable PCBs being the order of the day, flexible electronics is a key focus.
