Can you describe briefly your main line of business?

Denali focuses on the logic design and verification efforts for ASICs and SoCs. Our primary focus has been enabling efficient deployment of memory systems.
In full, our products include:
- Simulation models for all memories
- DDR DRAM controllers (IP) and PHYs
- NAND Flash controllers (IP), file systems, software
- PCI Express design cores (IP) and verification IP
- Verification IP for standards: USB, SATA, Ethernet, PLB, AMBA ...
- Blueprint: HW/SW register management tool

What is your best selling product and where do you ship it most?

Denali's best selling product are our simulation models for all memory devices. Denali's second most popular product is our verification IP for PCI Express, which goes with our logic controller specializing in Gen 2 and IOV. Rounding out our modelling and verification IP offerings, we have a broad portfolio of on-chip and off-chip protocols. We are honoured to serve hundreds of semiconductor companies as our customers. If a company designs chips, they most likely use, at least, one of our products.

What's your roadmap from there?

Presently, the most exciting opportunities are around NAND FLASH memory. In the last five years, NAND has had amazing growth. We estimate that this year, NAND manufacturers will ship more bits of NAND than the total number of DRAM bits ever. At the same time, NAND consumers have enjoyed massive price erosion. For these reasons, NAND is making its way into a wide variety of products, the most famous being of course Apple's line of iPods and iPhone.

We also see tremendous opportunities to provide value in embedded software. As the complexity of chips has skyrocketed, the responsibility for software, especially hardware-sensitive software, has moved from the systems manufacturer to the semiconductor provider. We can help our customers make great strides in productivity by integrating and validating software relevant to the IP we provide.

How do you differentiate from your competitors?

Over the last 11 years, we have invested tremendously in our relationships with the memory vendors and our SOMA-based technology for automating modelling and IP development. Our proprietary architecture makes us capable of efficient deployment of verification IP for highly complex protocols such as PCI-E. We invest in IP as our primary focus, and our infrastructure reflects the cumulative development of more than 100 engineering years of investment.

The value to our customers is quality. William Foster once said, "Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives." We commence with quality as our primary goal and build our solutions at the right boundary. For flash, we go with embedded software plus controllers and models. If we just stopped at the controller IP, customers are faced with huge integration challenges, and the quality of their results would suffer.

Any strategic move planned for the future?

We mentioned embedded software earlier, so stay tuned. Also, we are exploring architectural innovations to continue to reduce the effort and the cost of integrating of IP.

What would make your life easier in this business?

We've seen and our customers have seen a dramatic shift of responsibility, with embedded software moving to the semiconductor providers' side who are under extreme pressure to reduce costs and time at the hardware design level.

We see IP as truly the new abstraction for chip design, and believe this will lead to a massive disaggregation to 3rd parties. But to succeed, IP must off load the predominant amount of the cost of using IP in order to really drive the order of magnitude in value and productivity. To succeed, as an industry, we must encapsulate interfaces and IP into industry standards, including software APIs to achieve that efficiency gain.