In the Safelogic acquisition, Jasper gains nine employees at Safelogic's headquarters in Goteborg, Sweden.

Jasper's President and CEO Kathryn Kranen said Safelogic's employees are considered leading experts in formal verification and in particular the Property Specification Language.

Indeed, Safelogic's formal verification algorithm won accolades at the CADE ATP System Competition last year and that, said Kranen, is how Safelogic first came to the attention of Jasper.

"Their formal engine benchmarked the best in the world," said Kranen. "They have the most advanced raw algorithms and the most advanced implementations of PSL in the industry."

This, claimed Kranen, bodes well for future tool development at Jasper and immediately brings to Jasper's portfolio two formidable formal tools: the Safelogic Verifier, Safelogic's flagship PSL based formal property checker, and Safelogic Monitor, a plug-in for property simulation.

Kranen said the Safelogic tools compliment Jasper's flagship high level formal verifyier, JasperGold. Where engineers use JasperGold interactively to check that their design blocks comply to high level specifications, Safelogic's tools are push button, allowing engineers to quickly check if a given block does or does not satisfy user selected PSL assertions.

Kranen noted the acquisition also has market synergies, as Safelogic has growing following in Europe, while Jasper's gaining a solid foothold in North America.

Kranen said the merged company will continue to operate under the Jasper Design Automation brand and will be based in Mountain View, Calif. Par-Jorgen Parson has joined Jasper's board of directors, and Jonas Risberg, a Safelogic board member, will participate on Jasper's board as a "board observer." The Safelogic employees became employees of Jasper in December 2004, when the transaction closed.

Kranen declined to state whether or not Jasper is profitable. The company has raised $20.6 million in three rounds of funding. Kranen said the Safelogic acquisition brings additional cash to the company.

In addition to acquiring Safelogic, Jasper has also recruited a number of electronics industry veterans for its advisory board.

The initial members of the board include: Alan Hu, associate head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia; Sharad Malik, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University; Satoshi Goto, professor at the Graduate School of Information, Production and Systems, Waseda University, Kitakyushu, Japan; and Claudionor Coelho, associate professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.