Zafar, longtime vice president of worldwide marketing at Quickturn Design Systems, most recently spent a relatively short tenure as president and CEO of Silicon Design Systems, helping to turn the company from an ASIC and design services supplier to a pure play EDA company in the physical design space. Prior to Silicon Design Systems, he was CEO at Veridicom, a Lucent/Bell Labs spin off that designed and manufactured silicon fingerprint sensors for PCs and mobile phones.

Zafar said he chose Pyxis over "two or three" other companies because of the strong founding team—made up of one experienced chip designer and two EDA veterans—and board of directors, which includes Cadence Designs Systems founder Jim Solomon and Joe Hutt, a former Magma Design Automation and Synopsys executive who also has more than 30 years of experience at IBM.

Zafar was also attracted to Pyxis because he believes the company's technology fills a glaring need. The company is developing software that addresses the problems that chip designers and foundries face in the physical design, layout and routing of nanometer-scale ICs and system-on-chips (SoCs).

"The ballgame is changing at 90 nanometer and 65 nanometer," Zafar said. "The nanometer level has signaled a seismic shift. Physical design is going to undergo a lot of changes."

According to Zafar, designers today need to worry about what happens beyond tape out of a chip. With growing emphasis on design for manufacture (DFM) and design for yield (DFY), today's designers need to focus on how a design will perform in production. Zafar said Pyxis is the only company that he is aware of that is trying to bridge physical design and manufacturing.

"We've got to solve this problem during physical design," Zafar said. "It's not a fab issue anymore."

Pyxis has no products available to date, but Zafar said the team is hard at work. Current plans, he said, call for the company to work with a few "hand chosen" customers during the second half of the year and then bring a product to market sometime in 2006. With the Santa Clara office, Zafar said, Pyxis will now be able to attract talented Silicon Valley designers who can help with product development.

Given the company's focus, Zafar said he believes that Pyxis will have little difficulty attracting interest from customers, but instead will have to judiciously choose the right partners to work with in the early stages.

Zafar said integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) are recognizing the need to address yield and manufacturability during physical design. "Taping out a chip," Zafar said, "is only half the battle."

Pyxis was founded 14 months ago and has so far been operating in "stealth mode." The company's founders are P.T. Patel, a former designer at IBM and Sun Microsystems, and Sharad Mehrotra and Joe Rahmeh, both veterans of design software development at IBM and Sun.

The company has secured Series A funding from Austin Ventures and CMEA Ventures.