Magma announces Silicon One strategy

Magma Design Automation has introduced the Silicon One technology solutions for Magma users in India. This was announced by Rajeev Madhavan, chairman and CEO on the sidelines of the MUSIC 2011 in Bangalore, India, today.

Silicon One aims at making silicon profitable, especially for Magma's customers. It is a presentation of innovative solutions for advanced analog and digital design challenges. Magma outlined five technologies: Talus, Tekton, Titan, FineSim and Excalibur. The solutions work off a unified database for designing chips that combine analog, digital, memory, etc. Just about a week ago, Magma launched the global Silicon One seminar series in the US, Canada, Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, Israel and Europe, from Sept. 20 to Nov. 10.

"We are making solutions that customers can use. The global EDA industry is currently worth $4.5-$5 billion today, growing at a rate of 10 percent." As of now, 21 of the top 25 customers use Magma tools. It happens to be key EDA supplier to some household names in wireless.

Magma currently employs 696 people, of whom 77 percent are in application engineering or R&D. India has 220 (32 percent) employees as of now.

According to Madhavan, Silicon One is a platform of EDA solutions for emerging silicon. The three main pillars are: integration -- with a unified data model comprising capacity, concurrent optimization and chip finishing; completeness -- comprising full flow IP characterization, design implementation and design verification; and throughput -- comprising concurrent analysis and verification.

Magma has built three categories of solutions. These are:

SoC/ASSP: Building killer applications with an entire SoC.
AMS: Building analog mixed signal chips for mobility market.
Memory: Building high-speed memory chips for consumer applications.

Madhavan added: "We are mapping Silicon One solutions to the market. We are touching every single point of the silicon. We are providing a series for platforms -- such as digital design (Talus), analog verification (FineSim), analog design (Titan), digital sign-off (Tekton) and yield management (Excalibur). We have the opportunity to be a dominant yield management company."