Jock, first, thanks for the excellent CC summary. In this particular post I'm responding to, something you said about Mint didn't ring quite right to me, if I may nitpic.
I will be putting in a call to LSI IR in the near future
to learn more about the capabilities of Mint, but for the time being I am assuming
that Mint has at least somewhat the same capabilities as Cadence and Synopsys,
which is to say that LSI is now somewhat a player in the Fabless semiconductor
industry.
Now, if Mint is like a mini Cadence, then they would provide design tools (layout, simulation, speed analysis, etc.) to semiconductor companies, whether fab or fabless. But, they wouldn't be a player in the fabless industry, to me, they would instead be a supplier of tools to it, but just as easily to companies with fabs. It doesn't make any difference, to a Cadence, e.g., whether the company they sell their tools to ends up building the chips or not. Fabless players would be like the old Cyrix (before NSM) and Actel, and some of the other PLD companies (Xilinx?), i.e., smaller semi design companies that don't have the capital to build their own fabs.
Done with nitpic, certainly, the IC design tools biz is here to stay, and, managed well, Mint could grow faster than LSI, maybe. Throwing Avant! in with CDN and SNPS, LSI:
exchange2000.com
Another post coming re Linux.
Tony |
