MAGMA ANNOUNCES THAT STMICROELEC. IS IN PRODUCTION WITH NEXT-GEN PRINTER CONTROLLER.

Magma Design Automation, Inc. (Nasdaq:LAVA), a provider of chip design solutions, has announced that STMicroelectronics has entered production of a chip designed using Magma's Blast Fusion netlist-to-silicon system and Blast Plan hierarchical design software. The completed design is a next-generation printer controller that consists of about one million gates of logic and incorporates an ARM946ES core and a USB 2.0 interface running at 480Mbit/sec. STMicroelectronics selected Magma's solutions for this high-speed design after validating the tools' ability to handle large designs, meet strict timing requirements and shorten production schedules.

"We began an industry-wide evaluation of next-generation ASIC tools nearly one year ago and Magma's technology has proved to be ideally suited to our needs," said Giacomo Piccini, general manager of the Digital and Analog Semicustom Division in the Telecommunication and Peripherals/Automotive Groups at STMicroelectronics. "Magma has demonstrated significant value by consistently reducing the project timescales required to achieve timing-clean designs."

"One of the blocks had some very precise dynamic timing constraints, and required its own dedicated power supply for the standard cells," said Ugo Carena, general manager of the Printer Division in STMicroelectronics' Telecommunication and Peripherals/Automotive Groups. Carena added that the design was implemented hierarchically using Blast Plan and its Glass Box abstraction technique. This data reduction technique produces very compact block representations that contain all of the physical, timing and extraction data necessary for hierarchical design. Using these compact blocks, Blast Plan implements fast and accurate top-level chip assembly without consuming enormous amounts of memory. "The Glass Box implementation allowed us to continue using the original full-chip constraints and maintain accuracy even though we were effectively moving to a hierarchical design flow," Carena said.

"We're proud that STMicroelectronics has leveraged the high capacity and streamlined flow provided by Blast Fusion and Blast Plan for this challenging design, " said Rajeev Madhavan, chairman and CEO of Magma Design Automation. "Their success confirms our system's ability to handle large, complex designs and deliver superior results."

Magma software products enable chip designers to reduce the time required to design and produce complex integrated circuits in the communications, computing, consumer electronics, networking and semiconductor industries. Magma provides a single executable for RTL-to-GDSII chip design. The company's products, Blast Fusion, Blast Chip, Blast Plan and Blast Noise, utilize Magma's proprietary Fixed Timing methodology and single data model architecture to reduce the timing-closure iterations often required between the logic and physical processes in conventional IC design flows. [sections]