March 26, '09; BANGALORE: Electronic Design Automation (EDA) leader Synopsys' answer to the recessionary signals 'blowin' in the wind' for semiconductor design industry is to whip a number of existing tools together, add a hefty dose of management cockpit views and fab ready features, into a single seamless system called the Lynx.

Launching the product suite in India, Wednesday, Jai Durgam, Senior Director, Global Technical Services, Synopsys India, said the key addition was a unique management 'cockpit' which provided a web-based access to key matrices of the design process and used stored data to whip up trend graphics as well as real-versus-planned progress.

In keeping with the dummies approach to most high level monitoring tools in this industry, the cockpit's dashboard used the colours that head honchos would presumably be familiar with from their daily drives to work -- red, green and amber -- to indicate the project status of key chip design activities.

The new production flow features supported Synopsys' flagship Galaxy tools and also offered tight integration with ARM's processor solutions.

Many of the new features which went into Lynx' foundry-ready systems were crafted by India-based engineers of Synposys. They also drove the over 50,000 regressions or trial runs using the tool suite that are performed typically every two days to ensure the smooth and seamless performance of the design tool across different testing scenarios.
The Lynx data sheet in PDF can be found here: http://www.synopsys.com/Solutions/LynxDesign/Documents/Lynx-ds.pdf
Bangalore-based Wipro, with ARM and Oticon were three partners acknowledged by Synopsys as having played an important part in the beta stages of the Lynx rollout.

The global EDA market is worth some $ 3.5 to $ 4 billion annually and Synopsys has the biggest share -- estimated to be in the region of $ 1.4- $1.5 bn.