NuCORE Technology Standardizes on Magma RTL-to-GDSII Design Flow

Magma® Design Automation Inc. (Nasdaq: LAVA), a provider of semiconductor design software, today announced that NuCORE Technology, maker of the award-winning CleanCapture image processors, has standardized on Magma’s RTL-to-GDSII design flow, including Blast Create™ and Blast Fusion®. The decision to change flows came after Magma’s integrated design system enabled NuCORE to reduce area on this critical design by 16 percent, resulting in significant manufacturing and packaging cost savings; to take the design from final RTL to GDSII in significantly less time compared to the previous vendor’s solution; and to reduce leakage power, a key requirement for battery-powered devices such as digital cameras and camera phones, by nearly 20 percent. NuCORE Technology’s previous flow, which was based on point tools from a leading synthesis provider, had failed to complete the routing on this design.

“Using Magma products gave us a tremendous business advantage by letting us complete this chip with fewer engineers in much less time – Magma made us more productive and saved us a lot of money,” said NuCORE President and CEO James Chapman. “The point-tool flow we had been using required long turnaround times and large engineering teams. In fact, we originally had four engineers working on this chip, and despite dedicating four months worth of expert manpower to it, we were not able to complete the routing. But with Magma software we needed just two engineers to complete the design. Plus, we gained visibility into the design that helped us quickly improve the quality of our RTL, solve the routing and congestion problems and reduce the leakage power. As a result, we were able to fit the design into a smaller package, which results in considerable savings in manufacturing and packaging costs.”

“For large and small semiconductor companies alike, managing engineering resources and manufacturing costs is the biggest challenge in producing a chip today,” said Magma CEO Rajeev Madhavan. “We’re very pleased that NuCORE has validated the Magma software’s ability to address design challenges while reducing overall chip development costs.”

Integrated Flow Addresses Timing, Area, Power and DFT

NuCORE relied completely on the integrated Magma flow for this fast, multimillion-gate design. It was implemented by two engineers using Blast Create, Blast Noise®, Blast Rail™, Blast Power™ and Blast Fusion. Magma’s single executable architecture and unified data model provided the NuCORE team with a consistent and seamlessly integrated system, allowing them to determine routability of the design in only seven days. The final design incorporated scan-based design for test (DFT), and multi-mode constraints were used to achieve timing closure for all modes of this design. The built-in timer common to all the Magma products was used for implementation and the accuracy of the timing results was verified to correlate with their sign-off tool. Signal integrity sign-off was achieved with Blast Noise. All NuCORE Technology’s design challenges were quickly addressed through concurrent optimization, including clock gating, IR drop, multi-Vt, timing constraints, noise optimization and timing closure.

About Magma Design Automation

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, capacitance extraction, design for test (DFT), physical verification (DRC/LVS), static and statistical timing analysis, and characterization and modeling in a single executable, offering "The Fastest Path from RTL to Silicon"™. Magma's software also includes products for advanced logical, physical synthesis and architecture development tools for programmable logic devices (PLDs), FPGAs and Structured ASICs; 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.

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Blast Fusion, Blast Noise and Magma and are registered trademarks, and Blast Create, Blast Power, Blast Rail and “The Fastest Path from RTL to Silicon” are trademarks of Magma Design Automation Inc. All other product and company names are trademarks or 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 performance of Magma software and NuCORE’s standardization on Magma’s design flow, 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, NuCORE’s decision to continue using Magma’s software; both companies’ abilities to keep pace with rapidly changing technology; and their products’ abilities to produce desired results. Further discussion of these and other potential risk factors may be found in Magma's public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov). Magma undertakes no additional obligation to update these forward-looking statements.