SAN JOSE, Calif., June 14, 2010 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Magma® Design Automation Inc. (Nasdaq:LAVA), a provider of chip design software, today announced Sigma Designs (Nasdaq:SIGM), a leading provider of system-on-chip (SoC) solutions used to deliver entertainment and control throughout the home, has adopted Tekton™ for its next-generation media processor SoCs. Sigma Designs selected Magma's new static timing analysis (STA) platform because it offers significantly higher capacity and dramatically faster runtimes without sacrificing accuracy.
With advanced process nodes, large numbers of process corners are not uncommon. Analysis of these corners is very computationally intensive because all the paths in the design need calculation with different parasitic information for each corner. By utilizing Tekton's unique multi-mode/multi-corner analysis capability, Sigma Designs engineers are able to run all their modes and corners on a single machine with just a single Tekton license. Recently, Sigma used Tekton on a 500,000-instance block targeted for one of its latest SoC designs. For the target process node, timing analysis was required on eight process corners with two functional modes. Tekton accomplished the required analysis in a single STA run that took only 20 minutes.
"Our customers demand high-performance, affordably priced chips that offer innovative new features," said Jacques Martinella, vice president of engineering of Sigma Designs. "To meet these demands and tight market windows we need design and analysis solutions that allow us to reduce our development costs and turnaround time. With Tekton, our static timing analysis runtimes are truly exceptional and we are able to analyze a large number of scenarios on a single low-cost machine, which helps us dramatically shorten our turnaround time and reduce the number of licenses and amount of hardware we need."
"Tekton was specifically architected to address the increasing complexity of today's designs," said Premal Buch, general manager of Magma's Design Implementation Business Unit. "Based on this new architecture, Tekton provides our customers with best-in-class performance for very large designs with sign-off accuracy. Tekton's unique multi-mode/multi-corner analysis on a single machine has allowed customers like Sigma to produce chips faster at reduced cost."
Tekton Multi-Mode/Multi-Corner Analysis Speeds Turnaround Times and Reduces Costs
Performing multi-mode/multi-corner or multi-scenario analysis is time consuming, expensive and cumbersome. Design teams are often forced to purchase many expensive servers and accompanying software licenses to parallelize the multi-scenario analysis in order to shorten run times. In some cases, design teams resort to using abstracted timing models to accelerate the analysis, but at the expense of accuracy. Tekton performs extremely fast, multi-scenario analysis on a single machine and provides the accuracy of existing sign-off solutions. Over a variety of designs with up to 50 scenarios and design sizes up to 30M instances, Tekton performed timing analysis, with OCV and crosstalk enabled, in less than one hour on a single machine.
Magma will demonstrate Tekton and its entire line of chip design software in Booth 602 at the 47th Design Automation Conference (DAC) June 14-16 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim. For information about Magma's activities at DAC, visit www.magma-da.com/DAC2010.
About Magma
Magma's electronic design automation (EDA) software provides the "Fastest Path to Silicon"™ and enables the world's top chip companies to create high-performance integrated circuits (ICs) for cellular telephones, electronic games, WiFi, MP3 players, digital video, networking and other electronic applications. Magma products are used in IC implementation, analog/mixed-signal design, analysis, physical verification, circuit simulation and characterization. The company maintains headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and offices throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Asia and India. Magma's stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAVA. Follow Magma on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/MagmaEDA and on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/Magma. Visit Magma Design Automation on the Web at www.magma-da.com.
Magma is a registered trademark and "Fastest Path to Silicon" and Tekton are trademarks of Magma Design Automation Inc. 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 Magma software 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 Magma's ability to keep pace with rapidly changing technology and the company's 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.