Magma's Blast Fusion Passes 500 Tape-out Milestone
3/2/2004 - Magma ® Design Automation Inc. (Nasdaq: LAVA), a provider of chip design solutions, announced that Blast Fusion ® and Blast Fusion APXTM have reached a significant milestone, achieving more than 500 tape-outs, the majority on designs at 0.13 micron and smaller geometries. Customers have not only achieved single-pass silicon success, but also have benefited from better area, power and performance results as compared to point-tool flows. These improvements are enabled by Magma's patented FixedTiming® methodology and unique, unified data model architecture.
In the last year alone, Magma and key customers such as AMCC, Broadcom, Clearspeed, NEC, Renesas and Toshiba have announced significant design successes. Several IC manufacturers have acknowledged achieving fast single-pass silicon success on leading-edge 130-nanometer designs, pushing the envelope using Blast Fusion's multi-threshold voltage (multi-Vt) low-power design feature to reduce leakage power by 34 percent, managing design complexity that exceeds 18 million gates and delivering an extremely high-speed communications chip with a main clock speed of 622 MHz.
Growing adoption by new customers each quarter, increasing numbers of customers standardizing on Blast Fusion for nanometer designs and the fact that nine of the Top 10 semiconductor vendors use Blast Fusion are strong indicators of its growing market acceptance. Another indication of Blast Fusion's success is the dramatic increase in reader interest about Magma on DeepChip.com, a popular EDA user community website moderated by John Cooley, a well-recognized observer of the EDA industry. The commentary about Magma in Cooley's recently published DAC 2003 trip report – visit www.deepchip.com/items/dac03-26.html to read the comments – received “very roughly the same number of reader pageviews” as Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor , Cooley said. “Why that's interesting is that Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor each ballparks 3,000 to 4,000 employees,” Cooley noted. “Magma has roughly 300 to 400 employees. It's impressive that a company one tenth the size of any one of the ‘Big Three' alone managed to get a measurable mindshare footprint roughly the same size as Synopsys, Cadence and Mentor . I didn't expect that.”
“Blast Fusion has achieved a critical milestone,” said Paul Baek, director of product marketing at Magma. “Magma's unique approach to IC implementation and its unified system architecture have been proven in the marketplace and, as a result, Magma has gained a reputation as the technology leader for nanometer design. We are extending this technology lead even further with Blast Fusion APX, which provides unmatched capacity and runtime improvements, and includes multi-Vt and multi-voltage low-power design features, plus advanced manufacturing rule support proven with several 90-nanometer tapeouts.”
Integrated Nanometer Design Capabilities Deliver Unparalleled Benefits
Magma attributes this success to a number of nanometer design advantages in Blast Fusion:
Higher Quality of Results: Based on a unified data model architecture, Blast Fusion's various functional elements – such as the implementation engines for optimization, placement and routing, and the analysis software for timing and delay extraction – all operate directly on the unified data model without relying on file interfaces or application program interfaces (APIs). This tight integration allows more accurate analysis of the design and enables the system to make rapid tradeoff decisions during the design process to optimize for better timing, area and power.
AMCC credited Blast Fusion's high-capacity, correct-by-construction design flow for enabling them to address the timing, area, power and signal integrity challenges of a 622 MHz design and named Magma its “Supplier of the Year.”
Increased Manufacturability: Blast Fusion's design for manufacturability (DFM)-driven routing increases manufacturability of 130-nanometer and 90-nanometer designs by reducing die size up to 36 percent, reducing metal length up to 22 percent and reducing the number of via connections up to 32 percent.
Sycon credits Blast Fusion with reducing the area of its customer's design by 36 percent.
Faster Turnaround Time: Blast Fusion is based on the patented FixedTimingTM methodology. This approach enables Blast Fusion to predict circuit speeds prior to detailed physical design. The systems then use a series of design refinements during physical design to achieve a final timing that is very close to the predicted circuit speed. With predictable timing results, iterations from place and route back to synthesis can be eliminated, and turnaround time is significantly improved.
Broadcom recently taped out a 15-million-gate design using Blast Fusion®. By allowing them to identify and correct critical problems early and providing a correct-by-construction physical implementation flow, Magma accelerated the design effort, significantly reducing the product development cycle time. (See the entire news release at www.magma-da.com/PRBCBroadcom.html.)
Higher Capacity for Increased Productivity: Conventional point-tool flows have limited capacity, forcing designers to over-partition the design, unnecessarily complicating the design process. Blast Fusion can handle up to 6-million-gate designs flat within reasonable runtime. This allows design teams to handle entire designs flat, or to partition the design into just a few, easy-to-handle blocks.
Broadcom recently taped out a 15-million-gate design using Blast Fusion®. By allowing them to identify and correct critical problems early and providing a correct-by-construction physical implementation flow, Magma accelerated the design effort, significantly reducing the product development cycle time.
About Magma
Magma provides leading software for designing highly complex integrated circuits while maximizing Quality of Results with respect to area, timing and power, and at the same time reducing overall design cycles and costs. Magma provides a complete RTL-to-GDSII design flow that includes prototyping, synthesis, place & route, and signal and power integrity chip design capabilities in a single executable, offering “The Fastest Path from RTL to Silicon”TM. Magma's software also includes products for advanced physical synthesis and architecture development tools for programmable logic devices (PLDs); capacitance extraction; and characterization and modeling. 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, Blast Fusion and FixedTiming are registered trademarks and Blast Fusion APX and “The Fastest Path from RTL to Silicon” are trademarks of Magma Design Automation Inc.
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