A couple of years ago, the word "Magma" often elicited skepticism or amusement among EDA industry watchers. Many thought that Magma Design Automation was long on hype and short on substance. But a couple of recent indicators show that Magma is becoming a serious contender in chip design.

One of those indicators is Magma's most recent quarterly results, for its third fiscal 2004 quarter ending Dec. 31, 2003. The company realized a nice profit on revenue of $31.1 million, up 66 percent from the year-ago quarter. Executives cited strong sales of Magma's physical layout tools and "surprising" strength in synthesis, where Magma is taking on Synopsys' Design Compiler.

Perhaps more impressive, Magma expects that the current quarter will bring in $32 million to $34 million, while both Mentor Graphics and Cadence expect significant sequential declines going into the first calendar quarter of 2004.

Another indicator is a bit more informal. It's the DAC trip report, recently released by John Cooley, online at http://www.deepchip.com/posts/dac03.html. In his 2002 report, Cooley remarked that there were few Magma comments. "This year, I can't get the bloody Magma users to shut up," he wrote.

Most of the comments were positive. Engineers liked Magma's ease of use, integrated database, quality of results, gate capacity and synthesis speed. But no EDA vendor has truly "arrived" if there aren't some complaints. In generally balanced pro-and-con postings, some engineers voiced concerns about crashes, power closure, area optimization and the GUI.

While Magma is an up-and-coming EDA company, it has a long way to go before it becomes one of the "big" EDA vendors. Magma's revenue is a little more than one-tenth that of either Cadence or Synopsys, or at a run-rate of $120 million per year, about 4 percent of overall EDA industry revenues.

Magma is also in a product area that happens to be hot: IC physical design. Will the company be able to sustain its momentum when the retooling for 90 nm is basically complete? And will Magma become the first EDA vendor to successfully challenge Synopsys in synthesis?

Challenges and questions abound, but Magma has made impressive progress.

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