Magma Announces That Stmicroelectronics Has Selected Blast Chip Technology
CUPERTINO, Calif., May 1, 2002 Magma® Design Automation Inc. (Nasdaq: LAVA), a provider of chip design solutions, announced today that STMicroelectronics has entered into an agreement to license Magma's RTL-to-GDSII flow, including signal integrity capability, for deep-submicron ASIC design. Under this agreement, STMicroelectronics will deploy Magma's design software worldwide. This agreement follows ST's in-depth evaluation of Magma technology over the last year, including several pilot projects aimed at defining a more productive design flow for ST's 0.18-micron and smaller technologies.
As part of the agreement, STMicroelectronics will develop Magma flow support for its 0.13-micron and 0.09-micron process technologies.
STMicroelectronics has successfully completed more than six designs using Magma software to date and already has working silicon. The projects selected by ST were chosen to evaluate various different aspects of ASIC design from high-speed, high-density designs, to multimillion-gate SoC products.
In one particular design using ST's HCMOS8D 0.18-micron technology, ST engineers simultaneously achieved improvements of 5 percent in critical path speed, 13 percent in standard cell area, 28 percent in average power,
53 percent in peak power, 46 percent in clock tree components and 97 percent in turnaround time when compared to the current in-house flow.
"Magma's software gives us a substantial increase in productivity. We believe that Magma's unified data model, seamless tool integration and technology strength will help ST to solve the increased technical challenges at or below 0.13-micron. In particular Magma offers a unique solution for the design productivity challenges specific to these geometries," said Philippe Magarshack, group vice president for Design Automation, Central Research and Development at STMicroelectronics.
"After defining the floor-plan and a trial run, successive implementations of a complex design, which consisted of 800K logic gates and incorporated an ARM9E core and USB2 interface, were completed in a single pass and within a single day. This was an impressive improvement in time scale," said Giacomo Piccini, general manager of the Digital and Analog Semicuston Division of STMicroelectronics' Telecommunications and Peripherals/Automotive Groups.
"We're happy to be expanding our relationship with one of the world's largest semiconductor manufacturers," said Roy Jewell, president and COO of Magma Design Automation. "Teaming with STMicroelectronics to integrate Magma's products into its design flows will help us continue to deliver leading design solutions."
About Magma
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 FusionT, Blast ChipT, Blast Plan™, Blast Noise™ and Blast Prototype™ 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.
