News & Analysis
Magma rolls out 'Cobra' products
Richard Goering
4/4/2005 9:00 AM EDT
The Cobra initiative was part of a massive R&D effort that combined internal Magma development with technology from 11 startups. It claims new technology in such areas as integrated routing and optimization, statistical timing analysis, extraction, fast design-rule checking (DRC), and yield optimization.
"Cobra looks like a true 65/45 nm IC implementation tool set," said Gary Smith, chief EDA analyst at Gartner Dataquest. "It has both the DFM [design for manufacturing] capable router and the capacity improvement needed."
The new Cobra products are not, however, shipping yet, and Magma has yet to name any customers. The products are now in beta sites and are expected to be available during the second part of 2005.
A new capability within the existing Blast Fusion IC implementation system is what Magma calls "interconnect synthesis." Premal Buch, general manager of Magma's design implementation business unit, said this means that "full featured synthesis optimization," including sizing and buffering, is now done during routing. This is needed because crosstalk and on-chip variation (OCV) becomes very severe below 90 nm, he said.
Also new is "unified platform synthesis," a single synthesis engine that handles standard cell, FPGA, and structured ASIC implementations.
The nine new products include the following:
