CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
14 September 2004
Product News
Magma and ChipX Team to Deliver Unified RTL-to-GDSII Design Flow for Structured ASIC Platforms
Magma® Design Automation Inc. and ChipX, the structured ASIC leader, announced the availability of a unified RTL-to-GDSII design flow based on Magma's Blast CreateT and Blast Fusion®. The companies have worked together to test and customize the Magma flow to support the ChipX CX5000 family and future structured ASIC product families. The flow will be used by mutual customers and by ChipX to deliver low-cost structured ASIC designs or to migrate FPGA designs to ChipX's structured ASIC platforms.
"ChipX has been offering structured ASICs since the mid-nineties," said Elie Massabki, vice president of Marketing for ChipX. "After careful evaluation, we decided to partner with Magma to develop a structured ASIC design flow for our CX5000 and future families because its integrated RTL-to-GDSII system already offered most of the advanced capabilities we wanted. We're excited to be able to offer our customers a state-of-the-art design flow that will accelerate their time-to-market."
"Magma provides an integrated implementation solution for standard cell, structured ASIC and FPGA design within a common environment," said Behrooz Zahiri, director of marketing for Magma. "We're pleased to be working with the leading structured ASIC platform provider to offer our mutual customers a low-cost alternative to ASIC design that delivers high performance."
ChipX's structured ASIC implementation flow for the CX5000 and future families will be based on Magma's integrated solution. The flow offers many advantages:
• Structure-specific optimizations to maximize utilization and performance.
• Advanced physical synthesis technology tailored for the ChipX architecture to handle physical site constraints and overlapping site locations. In this way, the system is able to select and efficiently place the correct implementation of a functional cell to meet design-specific requirements.
• Heterogeneous placement to simultaneously place cells and macros, including the placement of a large number of embedded and distributed memory blocks.
• Timing, power and signal integrity analysis integrated with synthesis, floorplanning, placement and routing, clock tree synthesis, physical timing optimization and RC extraction to ensure fast turnaround time and design closure.
ChipX will provide customers access to the flow and provide support.
On September 17th, Steve Bateman, vice president of Engineering at ChipX will present a paper at Magma's third annual users group conference. The paper is entitled, "Structured ASIC Gears Up To Mainstream Design Flow." The MUSIC conference will be held in Santa Clara, Calif. and is open to all Magma user companies. For more information, please visit http://www.magma-da.com/MUSIC
ChipX is a manufacturer of late-stage programmable application-specific integrated circuits, or structured ASICs. The company's patented technology consolidates wafer production tooling, reduces time-to-market and minimizes the cost of initial production. ChipX's structured ASIC technology is widely used in communications, high-end consumer electronics, industrial control, medical equipment, automotive telematics, computing peripherals, and military/aerospace systems. Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, ChipX is a privately held corporation, founded in the U.S. in 1989.
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