Magma announces formal verification product Quartz Formal
By siliconindia staff writer   |   Wednesday, 28 April 2004, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Magma Design Automation Inc. (Nasdaq: LAVA), a provider of chip design solutions, today announced QuartzTM Formal, a new formal verification product based on Boolean equivalence technology licensed from IBM. Quartz Formal joins QuickCap in Magma’s suite of software products for signoff in integrated circuit (IC) design. “This logic equivalence checking technology is truly battle tested,” said Rajeev Madhavan, Magma chairman and chief executive officer. “It is based on technology that has been proven on some of the most demanding custom and standard IC designs IBM has produced. Quartz Formal is a complete equivalence-checking environment that encompasses the design implementation spectrum from RTL to gates and transistors. With this transaction we will be providing our customers with formal verification technology that supports RTL-to-gate equivalence checking, gate-to-gate equivalence checking and unique transistor-to-gate equivalence checking. And they will also enjoy an advantage in speed: with this technology our own quality assurance process has sped up by a factor of 6 to 20. That’s part of the reason we wanted to license this technology.” IBM has been developing and using this logic equivalence checking technology that Magma licensed for over 8 years. It has been used to support designs with greater than 270 million transistors, including IBM POWER4 and POWER5 microprocessors, as well as multiple ASIC designs. “The Quartz Formal product is about 10 times faster than any formal verification product we’ve used before,” said Moazzem Hossain, president and CEO of Fastrack Design. “This technology has helped us identify a couple of subtle problems in the designs that were considered clean by another leading verification tool. Combining this verification technology with Magma’s IC design flow will provide both assurance of highest quality and faster turnaround time.” The addition of Quartz Formal to Magma’s line of products expands the company’s offerings for IC design signoff. In 2003 Magma acquired QuickCap®, a product extensively relied upon by all industry-leading extraction tools as the “gold standard” for accuracy and QuickIndTM, which extracts inductance characteristics of interconnects from 3D physical structures. With Quartz Formal, the portfolio of signoff software adds yet another standard-setting product. 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 in a single executable, offering “The Fastest Path from RTL to Silicon”™. Magma’s software also includes products for advanced physical synthesis and architecture development tools for programmable logic devices (PLDs); 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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