Synchronicity And Cadence Team On IP Management And Reuse Infrastructure

Dec. 17, 2001

For OEMs in the age of intellectual property (IP) design and reuse, the challenges of managing the design chain are growing exponentially. Not only must design teams manage the creation, evolution, and sharing of complex and dynamic IP, but there must...

David Maliniak

To that end, Synchronicity Inc. of Marlboro, Mass., and Cadence Design Systems Inc. of San Jose have joined forces to combine their IP infrastructure technologies and products. The goal for both vendors is better service for their common customer base.

Synchronicity has acquired Cadence's IPinfraNET product and operations. Also, Cadence has made a minority equity investment in Synchronicity. Next, Synchronicity will merge the IPinfraNET software, as well as a number of Cadence's IPinfraNET staff members, into its existing IP management operation. IP Gear, Synchronicity's IP management tool, and IPinfraNET are both used to build design reuse and semiconductor IP distribution systems (see the figure).

"We will, as quickly as possible, merge the best of these two technologies into a single product line," says Synchronicity's CEO Dennis Harmon. Plans are to debut a merged product in the third quarter of 2002.

IP Gear, which will see introduction of Version 2.0 in the first quarter of 2002, is the older of the two products. Its development began in the 1996-1997 timeframe. As a result, it's been through a number of revisions and has become a very feature-rich tool with a significant user base. IPinfraNET, on the other hand, is a newer product that may not have all of IP Gear's bells and whistles. But what it does have going for it is a basis in newer database technologies such as Oracle, as well as Java.

"The idea is to leverage the more advanced underlying architecture of IPinfraNET in combination with the feature-rich product that is IP Gear," Harmon says. "When Cadence developed IPinfraNET, they had the benefit of knowing that Java technology, for example, was mature enough to be used. Back when we made the decision to use a different technology to implement IP Gear, it was unclear whether Java was the right approach at that time."

IPinfraNET lacks some of the design management features available to users of IP Gear, such as version control and tracking. Because IP Gear runs alongside Synchronicity's DesignSync tool, the merged product will gain that functionality as well.

About the Author

David Maliniak | MWRF Executive Editor

In his long career in the B2B electronics-industry media, David Maliniak has held editorial roles as both generalist and specialist. As Components Editor and, later, as Editor in Chief of EE Product News, David gained breadth of experience in covering the industry at large. In serving as EDA/Test and Measurement Technology Editor at Electronic Design, he developed deep insight into those complex areas of technology. Most recently, David worked in technical marketing communications at Teledyne LeCroy. David earned a B.A. in journalism at New York University.