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Magma Announces Silicon One Initiative

Magma Design Automation has launched Silicon One, an initiative intended to bring focus to making silicon profitable for customers by providing differentiated solutions and technologies that address business imperatives facing semiconductor makers today – time to market, product differentiation, cost, power and performance. Magma debuted its solution-oriented Silicon One offerings at the 48th annual Design Automation Conference in San Diego.

Silicon One's initial focus is on five types of devices that are key to electronic products that are most prevalent today:

• ASIC/ASSP: Network processing, data storage chips, and consumer multimedia chips such as ones in digital televisions (DTVs) are among the biggest silicon chips in the world. The massive sizes associated with these devices have made the cost and time associated with developing them nearly impractical.

• Analog/Mixed-Signal (AMS): The exponential growth of the wireless market has dramatically accelerated the need for more advanced analog/mixed-signal designs. Key critical analog blocks are increasing in AMS chips while the digital content is also growing to accommodate increased control functions. The latest generation of AMS designs resemble SoC devices – they are large, complex, and are created using more advanced process nodes.

• Memory: The proliferating use of SRAM, DRAM, Flash and image sensors in smartphones, cameras, tablets, notebooks, etc. has created one of the most competitive markets in terms of cost and time to market. The key concerns of these customers are high reliability memory chips (every bit of memory must work) at the lowest possible cost.

• Processing Cores: High-performance cores are the building blocks of any application or graphic processing chip today. The entire system performance is often limited by how fast these processing engines can run. Also, the system's power consumption has great dependencies with regard to how low power these cores can be.

• System-on-Chip (SoC): Today's state-of-the-art SoC designs integrate everything – digital (including multiple processing cores and hardware accelerators), analog, mixed-signal, and memory – together on a single chip. The result is that SoCs are among the most challenging and complex designs, but they enable the integration of many functions and provide the lower component cost, lower power consumption, and higher processing throughput demanded by the most advanced end-applications.



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