Inphi Corp., is buying most of eSilicon; while Synopsys will acquire the fabless vendor's embedded memory and interface intellectual property (IP) business. Inphi is to pay $216 million for eSilicon in both cash and assumption of debt, while the price that Synopsys paid for the memory assets was not disclosed. Targeting high-bandwidth networking, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G infrastructure markets, its IP includes configurable 7nm 56G/112G SerDes plus networking-optimized 16/14/7nm FinFET IP platforms featuring HBM2 PHY, ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM), specialized memory compilers and I/O libraries. Its neuASIC platform provides AI-specific IP and a modular design methodology to create ASICs. Speaking of the acquisitions, Jack Harding, president and CEO of eSilicon, said, "Our engineering talent, IP and customer relationships in networking, data-center and cloud, telecom 5G infrastructure and AI will help enhance their respective offerings." The Inphi acquisition of eSilicon is expected to close this quarter subject to US and Vietnamese regulatory approval (eSilicon has been in Vietnam since 2010).

Anytime the new cool thing comes around, all the cool engineers have to figure out the best ways to make it work. And we embark on a natural progression – or perhaps succession is a better word – sort of the way a depression along a river changes from pond to wetland to meadow. In general, you can get either performance or one or both of the other two. The thing is, though, that, if the best way to do the new thing isn't known yet, then you're likely to settle for something suboptimal for the sake of flexibility, figuring it out as you go, and perhaps fixing it after it's deployed in the field. After that, you might move to hardware of the flexible sort: FPGAs.