It appears that NVIDIA is not missing any chances when it comes to enhancing the use of its graphics processing units, having now chosen to invest in a software maker that develops tools for chip verification.
One could say that NVIDIA is more or less disadvantaged on the PC component market right now because it has no processors with integrated graphics on sale.Granted, the Tegra mobile platform does take care of things on the mobile front, especially with newbaseband processor making capabilities.Still, without selling anything that can challenge the AMD Fusion or Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs, the Santa Clara, California-based company has to make sure its GPUs are that much better, graphics-wise, than any integrated solution.This hasn't been too much of a problem, especially with AMD also wanting to make sure a market continues to exist for its own solutions.Nevertheless, things are starting to get heated on the low-end and mainstream front, so NVIDIA needs to make sure its products are as affordable and of as high a quality as possible.This can be made easier by design verification software, which detects and allows one to eliminate chip flaws, improving yields and directly affecting performance and manufacturing costs.Rocketick is one developer of GPU-based simulation acceleration for chip verification, and NVIDIA decided to invest $1.5 million in it. This brought the total fund raiser results to $2.5 million."We have been working with Rocketick over the past year and this partnership marks our first equity investment in an Israeli startup. In an industry where the complexity of simulating a chip grows exponentially, its technology is critically important,"said Jeff Herbst, Nvidia’s vice president of business development."We believe strongly enough in this startup that we’ve also licensed its software for our own chip designs. Using Rocketick’s software accelerator, which leverages Tesla GPU’s, we will be able to verify our chip designs up to 50-times faster than current in-house solutions,"
source
