Dec 16 2009

Update on Magma Dec 2009

Published by admin at 3:05 am under Uncategorized

Magma Design Automation is hanging in there as one of the big 4 public EDA vendors.  In a recent discussion with Bob Smith, VP of Marketing, who returned to Magma in March 2009 after a several year absence.  The discussion centered on a general update on where Magma is and what they are up to.
Mr. Smith’s marketing position is mostly focused on the digital products, so we did not have a discussion on the cell characterization tools or the analog products.  His understanding was that those areas were doing well based on customer feedback and benchmark data.
On the digital side, the first point that was made is that Magma is very busy on new technology having the tools be used for over 70 tapeouts at the 40nm node and they have a lot of activity at 28nm. In this definition, a tapeout is a design released from engineering to a fab. The tools are also still being used by customers at technologies back to 180nm, and in most application of really big designs.  These large designs (running with Talus Vortex v1.1) are typically 2M-3M instances that are being placed at the top level of the chip.  These large designs are typically flat (i.e. non-hierarchical) at the top level or they are flat “megacells” for use in other designs.
The other common trait of these designs is that they are low power designs which utilize multiple power rail pairs.  These multiple power rails can be automatically connected as separate voltage domains and support most of the low power methodologies including DVFS.  The Talus platform is also the only commercial package that is supporting BOTH UPF and CPF low power design methods.
There were two other points of benefit for the new platform – (1) it runs on a fairly minimum hardware platform – 4CPU, 32GB RAM, multi-threaded Linux (Red Hat / Ubuntu) and (2) the clock tree synthesis is now functional as a Multi-Mode Multi-Corner (MMMC) solution tool that can produce both flat and hierarchical clock trees to the Magma unified data model.  The direction for product improvement is on handling larger designs and additional variation for the MMMC analysis on the same minimum hardware configuration.  The target for all of these analysis is to maintain or improve the QOR for the designs.
On the topic of other products, their physical verification tool – Quartz, is now seeing use with a growing number of customers.  The big change in the product that prompted the increased use is the ability to natively read the SVRF rule file format used by the foundry supplied Calibre decks.  This eliminates the end user from having to translate and re-qualify the runsets for a given technology.
The financial position for Magma has been under discussion and rumor in the industry almost as much as the product direction.  Without going into all of the details, most of which are on the Magma web site with the transcript of the last quarter’s earnings call, Bob indicated they are doing OK.  They have had three consecutive quarter where they were cash positive at levels of single digit $M.  The concern during late summer was their structure for dealing with the bond that Is due in April of 2010.  Magma has successfully re-structured this note with over 50% now being deferred to 2014, and available funds or other payment structures for the balance.  The end result, is the April note is now a non-issue, and the company has an on-going positive cash flow.
PC

Magma Design Automation is hanging in there as one of the big 4 public EDA vendors.  In a recent discussion with Bob Smith, VP of Marketing, who returned to Magma in March 2009 after a several year absence.  The discussion centered on a general update on where Magma is and what they are up to.

Mr. Smith’s marketing position is mostly focused on the digital products, so we did not have a discussion on the cell characterization tools or the analog products.  His understanding was that those areas were doing well based on customer feedback and benchmark data.

On the digital side, the first point that was made is that Magma is very busy on new technology having the tools be used for over 70 tapeouts at the 40nm node and they have a lot of activity at 28nm. In this definition, a tapeout is a design released from engineering to a fab. The tools are also still being used by customers at technologies back to 180nm, and in most application of really big designs.  These large designs (running with Talus Vortex v1.1) are typically 2M-3M instances that are being placed at the top level of the chip.  These large designs are typically flat (i.e. non-hierarchical) at the top level or they are flat “megacells” for use in other designs.

The other common trait of these designs is that they are low power designs which utilize multiple power rail pairs.  These multiple power rails can be automatically connected as separate voltage domains and support most of the low power methodologies including DVFS.  The Talus platform is also the only commercial package that is supporting BOTH UPF and CPF low power design methods.

There were two other points of benefit for the new platform – (1) it runs on a fairly minimum hardware platform – 4CPU, 32GB RAM, multi-threaded Linux (Red Hat / Ubuntu) and (2) the clock tree synthesis is now functional as a Multi-Mode Multi-Corner (MMMC) solution tool that can produce both flat and hierarchical clock trees to the Magma unified data model.  The direction for product improvement is on handling larger designs and additional variation for the MMMC analysis on the same minimum hardware configuration.  The target for all of these analysis is to maintain or improve the QOR for the designs.

On the topic of other products, their physical verification tool – Quartz, is now seeing use with a growing number of customers.  The big change in the product that prompted the increased use is the ability to natively read the SVRF rule file format used by the foundry supplied Calibre decks.  This eliminates the end user from having to translate and re-qualify the runsets for a given technology.

The financial position for Magma has been under discussion and rumor in the industry almost as much as the product direction.  Without going into all of the details, most of which are on the Magma web site with the transcript of the last quarter’s earnings call, Bob indicated they are doing OK.  They have had three consecutive quarter where they were cash positive at levels of single digit $M.  The concern during late summer was their structure for dealing with the bond that Is due in April of 2010.  Magma has successfully re-structured this note with over 50% now being deferred to 2014, and available funds or other payment structures for the balance.  The end result, is the April note is now a non-issue, and the company has an on-going positive cash flow.

PC

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