The Testbench

I’m not exactly a fitness buff although I’ve been trying for the past year or two—again—to get my weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol under control. Working out is something that I have gone on and off for years. In the past, frankly, I’ve...

Each time I meet or speak with any of the T&M equipment houses, I hear one variation or another on the theme of getting design and test engineers to upgrade their bench instruments. Of course, these folks are in the business of selling you new...

On the heels of its quarterly earnings call today, Synopsys announced that it will acquire Magma Design Automation for the tidy sum of $507 million ($7.35 per share). Thus ends the ride for Magma, which, since its inception in 1997, had proved...

Only rarely do I get to cover big consumer-electronics events; I just got back from a fun one. Motorola Mobility and Verizon teamed here in New York to roll out Motorola's latest smart phone, the Droid RAZR. At just 7.1 mm thin and weighing in at...

Over the past couple of years, a quiet war has erupted among the major oscilloscope manufacturers. No blood has been shed—yet—but a lot of engineering blood, sweat, and tears have surely been expended in this war. The battleground is bandwidth...

There’s been a lot of chit-chat of late in EDA circles about clouds, and I’m not talking about weather, gloomy market forecasts, or a Joni Mitchell song. There was a bit of buzz at DAC about cloud computing and what that might mean for EDA. The...

NI’s recent acquisitions of AWR and Phase Matrix should make RF engineers sit up and take notice. It’s not as if NI didn’t already have a good amount of RF expertise in the house; last year’s introduction of its PXI VNA module was proof of that...