Sequence (San Jose, Calif.), formerly known as Frequency Technology, has over the last year made a concerted effort to expand beyond the deep submicron space and become a premier provider of design closure tools, moving closer toward front-end design in the SoC design flow.

The company acquired power analysis tool specialists Sente in March, bringing Sequence power analysis up to the RT level. Now, with the acquisition of Sapphire, Sequence has a placement optimization technology that would appear to place the company directly in competition with the likes of Avant!, Cadence and Synopsys.

But Alain Labat, president and chief executive officer of Sequence, said that the company has no intention of offering synthesis and routing tools. And with the Sapphire acquisition, Sequence now offers a "complete design closure offering for SoC designs" that enhances, not competes, with new physical synthesis as well as traditional synthesis to place and route tool flows.

"We now have a full suite of creation tools," said Labat. "Customers are telling us that synthesis and routing tools are doing the job in implementing designs; however, the new processes and complexities are requiring a new set of timing, power and signal-integrity solutions. These tools can be added on to implementation tools, allowing designers to not just meet timing requirements but create optimal designs."

"The bottom line is that design closure is much broader than just timing closure that many of these physical synthesis tools offer," said Kevin Walsh, vice president at Sapphire (San Jose) and now vice president of products at Sequence. "We at Sequence are focused on the creation and correction around that implementation set. We are going to get customers where they really want to be. Customers want more than just meeting timing requirements, they want to meet timing requirements at a proper yield. Their designs need to be immune to noise: They need to look at more than meeting timing, they need to look at tapeout success."

In the acquisition, Sequence not only gains the Sapphire flagship placement-based timing optimization tool FormIT but also the NoiseIT signal-integrity optimization tool, the ClockIT clock-tree synthesis tool and the PowerIT physical power optimization tool.

Labat said the companies are treating the acquisition as a merger, and all of Sapphire's 30 employees are moving to Sequence. Shashank Goel, Sapphire's president and chief executive officer, will sit on Sequence's board of directors and become the vice president of advanced R&D.

Labat said that Goel's mission will be to find synergies in the many point tools now under Sequence's banner and to create integrated tools.

Walsh said that Sapphire was doing well and was "cashflow" positive. Meanwhile, Labat said that Sequence is also doing well and is expected to become profitable by the end of this quarter.

"The combined company now puts Sequence on the top 15 lists in terms of revenues," said Labat. "We now have 130 employees worldwide, and we intend to expand our staff and market position through hiring as well as merger and acquisition."

Labat expects Sequence will go public sometime in 2001.