Polaris Design acquires ASIC/SoC prototyping business of IRIS

SANTA CLARA, USA: Polaris Design Systems Inc., a newly established Silicon Valley company that focuses on high performance, hardware-enabled semiconductor verification solutions, has acquired the ASIC/SoC prototyping assets of IRIS Technologies Inc.

IRIS developed and marketed multiple generations of Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR) FPGA-based ASIC prototyping solutions since 2006. Polaris Design Systems will continue to engineer, market and support the Altera Stratix family of ASIC/SoC prototyping solutions. “I am thrilled at the opportunity to offer a compelling solution to the SoC designers,” said Rahm Shastry, chairman and CEO of Polaris Design Systems.

“As more and more SoC designs engage in integration of pre-existing design IPs, it is imperative that it be thoroughly verified prior to a chip tape out -- including running application-level software on the stitched RTL code so as to identify and fix corner-case and functional level defects in their implementation. Software simulators cannot handle the complexity and are excruciatingly slow, while the traditional, big-box, hardware emulation platform is expensive and difficult to use. Our standards-based, Altera FPGA-based ASIC/SoC prototyping products offer a sweet spot with its compelling, price/performance metrics. We recently delivered our first revenue shipment to a large Japanese industrial conglomerate, who was a repeat customer of IRIS.”

Polaris Design Systems also announces the appointment of PROTOtyping Japan as its exclusive distributor in Japan. “PROTOtyping Japan has been a leading distributor of ASIC prototyping solutions to the semiconductor industry starting with Hardi Electronics, which is now part of Synopsys. We are pleased to partner with them as our exclusive distributor in Japan,” remarked Shastry.

“We have successfully sold and supported IRIS’ ASIC prototyping solutions since 2009. We have known Rahm-san for a long time, and we are very pleased that Polaris Design Systems will continue to support our Japan customers with innovative, high-performance prototyping solutions,” said Noriyuki Sasaki, president and CEO of PROTOtyping Japan.