Avatar's technology basically includes all of ATopTech's previous tools, including the Aprisa and Apogee layout and winding tools used by many IC designers; and the new company's management team also includes ATopTech's co-founder and architecture chief Ping. San Tzeng, and two EDA veterans who have served as senior executives at the Advancent Computer Cadence Design Systems, Chi-Ping Hsu and Charlie Huang.
Founded in 2003, ATopTech lost a lawsuit against Synopsys, the leader of the EDA market, and filed bankruptcy and auctioned assets in the US last year. Jingyuan Han, chairman of China Eastern Group, acquired ATopTech in a low-key manner. The company also served as the chairman of Avatar. Han Jingyuan was born in Hong Kong and has a successful steel industry in mainland China. It is ranked 136 on the Forbes magazine China Rich List.
The lawsuit between ATopTech and Synopsys originated from the copyright dispute in 2013; in 2016, the US federal court jury found that ATopTec infringed the instruction set related patents in Synopsys' PrimeTime static timing analysis tool suite, and determined that the latter should receive $30 million. The damages also forced ATopTech to claim bankruptcy.
Before the bankruptcy, ATopTech's layout-and-route technology grew well, and it won favors from major customers including Samsung and Xilinx, and grabbed some Synopsys cities. The market research firm Pedestal Research research director Laurie Balch said that ATopTech's peak sales had reached about $30 million a year; 'Everything collapsed after the lawsuit came out,' Balch said: 'Before that, their business Yes, the technology is quite popular with users and is considered to be of high quality and practical.'
Xu Jiping and Huang Xiaoli, who have recently joined Avatar, have deep qualifications in the EDA industry, and most of them are in Cadence--Xu Jiping, who served as the strategy leader of the latter, and Huang Xiaoli, executive vice president and general manager. Huang Xiaoli said that although Some of ATopTech's customers lost after the company went bankrupt, but many continued to use their tools and now become Avatar's customers; he also stressed that despite the litigation, the company's technology continues to keep pace with process node evolution, and now there are 3 The customer's design case is 7 nm design: 'If we are stagnant because of previous bankruptcy, we can't do it.'
'Chinese-funded' background? The background of Avatar's chairman Han Jingyuan, who acquired ATopTech's assets, is particularly concerned about the fact that the US technology is being acquired by Chinese companies. Politico, a political commentary site in the United States, had an article in ATopTech in May. The event, which was auctioned in March 2017, was introduced as an introduction to the investigation report on the impact of the US government on the failure of the US government to sell technology assets to overseas companies.
In this regard, Pedestal Research's Balch pointed out: 'What is worrying is that the relationship between the new EDA company and China is not completely clear. ' But Huang Xiaoli underestimated any link between the company and China, only stressed that Avatar is a family. Most of the engineers in the Silicon Valley-based US company are in the US; he also pointed out that Han Jingyuan also invested in other EDA startups, but it is not convenient to disclose the company names.
Xu Jiping joined Avatar as a retired from Cadence. He sees this as an opportunity to promote the innovation of physical design technology in the era of process technology entering FinFET and increasing complexity; he further explained that synthetic technology was in the 1990s. The mainstream of physical design, followed by the rise of layout technology. Xu Jiping pointed out that Aprisa is welcomed by the market and reflects the key trend of IC design technology towards detail routing: 'paradigm has been transferred,' he still sees in the layout There are a lot of room for productivity improvement with winding.
Compile: Judith Cheng