Industry Summary Articles

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rocketick Technologies Ltd., an Israel based pioneer and leading provider of multicore parallel simulation. Rocketick’s technology accelerates Cadence Incisive® Enterprise Simulator to provide up to 6X speed-up for register-transfer-level (RTL), up to 10X speed-up for gate-level functional and up to 30X speed-up for gate-level DFT simulations using standard x86-based servers. The Rocketick solution is proven and is in use today by numerous marquee systems and semiconductor companies in the mobile, server, and graphics domains. The integration of Rocketick’s technology will serve to strengthen Cadence’s System Design Enablement strategy by delivering ultra-high-performance simulation to accelerate the development of complete systems with the consumer end-product in mind. 

“Ensuring that SoC verification is completed on time within ever shrinking project schedules is driving the strong need to speed up the underlying logic simulation technology,” said Anirudh Devgan, senior vice president and general manager of the System & Verification Group and the Digital & Signoff Group at Cadence. “Rocketick is the leading, established provider of parallel simulation technology. I look forward to welcoming the Rocketick team to Cadence as we accelerate our innovation in functional verification to solve our customers’ most difficult challenges.” 

Rocketick’s market-leading technology achieves linear speed-up by parallelizing simulation on standard x86-based multicore servers, providing automated partitioning across designs and testbenches, and the flexibility to direct simulations to server farm resources ranging from one to 64 cores. It also provides a significant accuracy advantage and enhanced visibility with four-state logic simulation, and reduces host memory footprint by 2-3X for gate-level designs. Rocketick’s technology works seamlessly with the Cadence Incisive Enterprise Simulator without the need to modify designs or testbenches, eliminating ramp-up time while providing accurate results at significantly accelerated speeds. 

“Rocketick and Cadence serve market-leading customers whose exploding verification challenges are testing the limits of conventional simulators” said Tomer Ben-David, CEO of Rocketick. “Rocketick’s technology has been proven to deliver as much as 30X faster simulation on very challenging designs at top tier system and semiconductor companies. We are very excited to join the Cadence team and look forward to providing even more benefit to customers through the tight integration of Rocketick’s core engines with Cadence’s overall verification solution.” 

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal 2016, and is not expected to have a material impact on Cadence’s fiscal 2016 results of operations. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Rocketick is backed by investments from Intel Capital and other strategic and financial investors. Needham & Company advised Rocketick on the transaction. 

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