Pallab’s Place

Opening Address by MUSIC Chairman Dr. Uming Ko, senior fellow and director of the Worldwide Chip Technology Center from Texas Instruments. 150 attendees were registered and the opening address had one third of them. Dr. Ko opened MUSIC on a positive note looking at the new problems we face in the industry including the economical downturn as challenges. Point being the feature sizes keeps reducing further and all the devises that we use must have portability, ability and capability. The challenge today is the batteries ability to power the devices.

I drifted between the various sessions by Magma and customers: TI, nVIDIA, IDT… The excitement at the user conference were lingering in the sessions, initially covering Titan’s ability and Talus’ speed improvements in the Analog Design and Circuit Simulation covering highly intensive migration across Analog and Digital domains, through Magma’s new approach to mixed signal portability that is being developed as I write.

I ran into Magma Chairman and CEO Rajeev Madhavan in the hallway who was bubbling of excitement that one usually sees when companies back in the late nineties were about to be acquired. However, his excitement was, at the show, about being able to migrate mixed signal designs both logic and analog, from process node to process node once the designs were in the Magma systems, the announcement will be announced at DAC in San Francisco in July. Rajeev also mentioned how they have been able to reduce Talus’ runtime by 3X and expects to see further reductions by September of another 2X.

Rajeev’s excitement carried into the Keynote where all the 150 attendees patiently waited. Rajeev started with a quick look at the economy which along with many other things has forced Magma to do things differently and go “back to basics” (haven’t we all been forced to that lately), and focus on the core values. Magma can’t succeed alone on “me too” solutions unless one can show a 10x speed improvement, and thus Magma’s new breakthrough with analog migration. So what’s next: Last year Magma’s focus was productivity for SOC designs and they claim the ability to handle up towards 100M cells in the next 6 months by parallel distribution of the various blocks. In addition, the support burden has been reduced along the runtimes. However, the excitement that was left hanging after the keynote, was the announcement of Titan’s ability to, once design has been captured, with some work in capturing it initially, move the designs from process node to process node, enabling one environment for analog and digital designs = TITAN.

We have been facing the same “me too” issues at Nangate until we enabled application specific library development capabilities. DIFFERENTIATION IS KEY IN THIS ECONOMY!

Jens C. Andersen, Special Topic Editor for Extension Media, and VP of Worldwide sales and Managing Director of US Operations for Nangate Inc. Nangate develops tools to create standard cell libraries, and optimization tools and services enabling application specific libraries resulting in optimized speed, area and power. jca@nangate.com

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