As the 2011 Edition of Design, Automation and Test in Europe begins today in Grenoble, ongoing news from Japan will be on the minds of many.

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Earthquake ...

The news from Japan is profound, with massive tsunami devastation and loss of life along the northeast coast, and severe damage to several nuclear power facilities located in the vicinity of the March 11th off-shore earthquake, now upgraded by Japanese authorities from 8.9 to 9.0.

On the business side, it appears that many manufacturers across the country are halting production to verify the integrity of their facilities. Power shortages due to infrastructure damage and the shut-down of nuclear plants may also inhibit re-starts. Reuters is reporting on March 13th that Canon, Panasonic, Sony, and Toshiba are among the electronics companies expecting to delay production re-starts in the northeast of Japan.

In an email report received just hours after the earthquake hit, Jim Handy at Objective Analysis said, “Over 40% of the world's NAND flash and roughly 15% of the world's DRAM are manufactured in Japan. Japan is a significant source of chips to support consumer electronics devices. A two-week shutdown would remove from production a sizable share of each of these. It doesn't take a large production decrease to cause prices to increase dramatically.

“Objective Analysis anticipates phenomenal price swings and large near-term shortages as a result of this earthquake. Demand will be impacted as well since many electronics manufacturers are in Japan, and their consumption of semiconductors will be halted until earthquake damage is repaired.”

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In other news ...

Here's a sampling recent additional news that will also inform the conversation at DATE 2011.

* Applied Materials and Magma announced “they have integrated Magma's CAD-based navigation and yield analysis software with Applied's advanced inspection systems.”

* Arteris and EVE announced the integration of Arteris’ NoC interconnect creation and deployment with EVE’s hardware emulation, “enabling developers to easily generate and use actual SoC RTL implementations on EVE Zebu server emulation hardware.”

* ASSET announced it's “the first to launch third-party validation and debug tools for designs targeting future 22nm Intel CoreT processors for the desktop and mobile marketplaces.”

* CEVA announced “joint research into the development of cellular modem technologies targeting next-generation wireless baseband standards with NEC Casio Mobile Communications.”

* CoFluent Design announced it has joined Cadence's System Realization Alliance.

* Compaan Design and PolyCore Software (PSI) announced a collaboration: “PSI Poly-Platform and Compaan HotSpot Parallelizer provide designers with next-level analysis and implementation capabilities, simplifying mult-core programming.”

* Coventor announced the SEMulator3D 2011 version of its virtual fabrication software for semiconductor and MEMS process development, “including three-fold performance improvements and 3D mesh generation capabilities.”

* Duolog Technologies and Xuropa announced that “the Duolog's Socrates Bitwise SoC register management tool is now available for evaluation in The Cloud.”

* IDME Development Corp. announced Circuits Multi-Projects (CMP) has chosen IDME’s “proprietary ultra-stable Organic (polymer) Photovoltaic Cells (OPVs) for universities, research labs and small company customers.”

* Imperas announced a reference virtual platform, based on the ARM Cortex-M processor, using the Micrium µC/OS II RTOS, which provides “open source models of the virtual platform for embedded system designers.” Imperas also announced MIPS has licensed an OEM version of the OVPsim [Open Virtual Platforms] simulator.

* Kilopass and Vimicro International announced Vimicro is used Kilopass NVM IP in a line of notebook PC-camera processors.

* Oasys Design Systems announced a new release of its Chip Synthesis platform with “enhanced capabilities that include chip-level power analysis and the ability to re-synthesize a design from the RTL with new power constraints.”

* SpringSoft's Laker announced “a new signoff-driven custom layout flow with OpenAccess-based integration of Mentor Graphics' new Calibre RealTime platform.”

* Synopsys announced FPGA-synthesis support for Xilinx' ISE Design Suite 13.

* Toumaz announced its TELRAN ultra-low energy, high-performance sub-1GHz radio SoC with 1Volt operation uses a single button cell battery and exhibits less than 3mW continuous-use power consumption.