Magma Introduces Blast Prototype for Silicon Virtual Prototyping

CUPERTINO, Calif., April 30, 2002 Magma Design Automation Inc. (Nasdaq: LAVA), a provider of chip design solutions, today introduced Blast Prototype™, a silicon virtual prototyping (SVP) solution that accurately estimates silicon-level performance at the RTL level. Blast Prototype enables logic designers to analyze and improve the quality of the RTL they hand off to the downstream tool, which results in a predictable path to timing closure and a shorter design cycle. Integrating Magma's production-proven gain-based synthesis, SuperCellsT, abstracted physical synthesis, timing analysis and hierarchical design capabilities, Blast Prototype generates highly accurate prototypes and allows extensive design exploration to eliminate costly and time-consuming design iterations.

"The Silicon Virtual Prototype has three major functions," said Gary Smith, chief analyst for the Electronic Design Automation Worldwide program in Gartner Dataquest's Design and Engineering Group. "First, it becomes the primary design cockpit. Second, it provides the information necessary for an RTL handoff to an ASIC vendor or third-party design house. Third, and today the most important, it drives the IC implementation tools. Engineers have found that no matter how good the IC Implementation tool set, they still can suffer from the old 'garbage in, garbage out' problem."

A Complete Silicon Virtual Prototyping Flow
The advantage of Blast Prototype is that it performs all three functions. It enables designers to explore the architecture, constraints, design IP, logical hierarchy and partitioning choices at the RTL or netlist level. It can drive the logic synthesis process with accurate constraints for the logic partitions. Or it can drive the physical implementation process with a final detailed floorplan and accurate timing and topological budgets for top-level physical blocks.

Fast and Reliable Prototyping with Gain-based Synthesis and SuperCells Like Magma's full IC implementation solution, Blast Prototype uses gain-based synthesis and SuperCell abstracts, enabling it to synthesize several million gates at a time and generate an Early Silicon Performance (ESP) report. SuperCells are functional placeholder cells with variable sizes and fixed delay. The delay budget assigned to a SuperCell is referred to as its gain value. Blast Prototype generates an ESP report that gauges the post-layout timing feasibility of the design based on the virtual prototype placement and routing. An Endpoint Gain Report is also generated that identifies problematic paths. An endpoint with a low gain indicates a challenging delay requirement that may prevent the design from meeting timing. With the information in this report, the logic designer can address these issues before handing off the design for implementation.

"Magma's Early Silicon Performance analysis has already saved NEC Electronics a considerable amount of time by enabling us to quickly identify and report potential problems back to our customers' logic designers," said Stuart Hamilton, director, design support, Design Execution Center, NEC Electronics Inc. "Blast Prototype has empowered us to physically analyze each design and give feedback to our customers' logic designers, which allows them to improve the quality of their handoff-to-implementation. Our experience has shown it to provide a higher level of confidence that performance goals can be achieved."

Seamless Fit with Magma and Third-Party Flows
Blast Prototype outputs netlist, floorplan and constraints in industry-standard data formats and can be used in third-party flows. Logic designers can get early feedback on the estimated performance of their designs and drive commonly used synthesis tools with the partitions and SDC constraints generated by Blast Prototype.

When used in conjunction with Blast Fusion, Blast Prototype offers additional benefits. Magma's gain-based approach ensures that the decisions made during the prototyping and planning phases are retained in the unified data model and guide the implementation. This allows the designer to hand off the design with confidence that performance estimates generated by Blast Prototype will be achieved by Magma's IC implementation solution.

Pricing and Availability
Blast Prototype will be available for both the Solaris and Linux operating systems. Pricing starts at $295,000 per year for a 3-year time-based license. Contact Alok Mehrotra for more details: alok@magma-da.com or at (408) 864-2227.

About Magma Design Automation
Magma software products enable chip designers to reduce the time required to design and produce complex integrated circuits in the communications, computing, consumer electronics, networking and semiconductor industries. Magma provides a single executable for RTL-to-GDSII chip design. The company's products, Blast Fusion™, Blast Chip™, Blast Plan™, and Blast Noise™ utilize Magma's proprietary FixedTiming­ methodology and single data model architecture to reduce the timing-closure iterations often required between the logic and physical processes in conventional IC design flows. Magma's Diamond SIT also leverages the single data model architecture to provide an integrated, standalone platform for post-layout, sign-off-quality signal integrity verification.

Magma maintains headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., as well as sales and support facilities in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego, Calif.; Boston, Mass.; Durham, N.C.; Laurys Station, Pa.; Austin and Dallas, Texas; Newcastle, Wash.; and in Germany, Israel, Japan, Korea, The Netherlands, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. The company's stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAVA. Visit Magma Design Automation on the Web at www.magma-da.com.

Magma and FixedTiming are registered trademarks and Blast Chip, Blast Create, Blast Fusion, Blast Noise, Blast Plan , Blast Prototype, Diamond SI and SuperCell are trademarks of Magma Design Automation. All other product and company names are trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective companies.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS:
Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters set forth in this press release, including statements about the features and benefits of Blast Prototype, its ability to generate accurate prototypes, improve the RTL handoff, and allow design exploration and eliminate iterations, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including, but not limited to, whether technical problems will impede the ability of Blast Prototype to provide desired results; and market acceptance of Blast Prototype. Further discussion of these and other potential risk factors may be found in Magma's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2001 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") on February 14, 2002, and from time to time in Magma's SEC reports. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof. Magma disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.