A review of the EDA industry in 2010 provides a look at what could be in store for the coming year, starting with the automation of the mixed-signal design flow. In 2010, virtually every SoC design is a mixed-signal design –– a mixture of digital and analog functions. For example, the modern high-end cell-phone has a single, large, high-performance mixed-signal IC containing the bulk of the analog and digital functionality combined with a special RF chip. Mixed-signal design has become much more challenging, yet the evolution of a true mixed-signal solution has been relatively slow.

NVIDIA's Tegra 2 System-on-Chip (SoC) components are becoming increasingly popular, especially since many companies out there are preparing their tablets for 2011. Word is going around the Acer, Asustek, Toshiba and Samsung are all developing tablets based on the platform.

Texas Instruments has just unveiled its latest mobile chip, and the new OMAP4440 kind of makes NVIDIA’s blazing fast 1GHz dual core Tegra 2 chip seem like last year’s news.