Magma; the design flow master extends its design flow expertise to analog/mixed signal

Magma has pioneered the 'easy-design-flow' concept in VLSI design. Magma's chip design software is widely used in final stages of semiconductor chip design. Magma is founded and headed by an Indian born American Rajeev Madhavan. Just like other EDA software companies, Magma has significant presence in India. Recently Magma has appointed Alok Mehrotra as Managing Director of its India business. I recently talked to him about Magma's products and VLSI design industry in general, here are the excerpts.

Q: What's new at this year's MUSIC conference?

Alok Mehrotra (AM): If you are aware of the history of the Magma, Magma came and revolutionized the semiconductor design industry by combining the flow (design flow). We came up with a unified data model, basically combining multiple tools doing critical parts of implementation into a single flow, making it a lot faster and lot more predictable. Because of this innovation, Magma has become very popular. The competition went ahead and copied and now all of the competitors offer a unified flow. The new thing that we announced at Music this year is that - we have come out with a similar revolutionary flow for analog mixed signal design. We also announced the success of tools such as Tekton and FineSim. These tools run 10 times faster than the best competitors tools. These give the customers very large saving both in hardware as well as turn around time.

Q: What are the key technology trends now in VLSI industry?

AM: Design implementation has become very well defined -lot of the times because of the complexity of designs increasing exponentially - lot of time is being spent in validation (timing validation). The Tekton tool that we announced successfully addresses that trend, where people need to simulate and time multiple corners, multiple volts. And the complexity of the designs makes very daunting task - because, you can't have these parts fail. So having such a daunting task, both Tekton and FineSim address exactly that.

Q: Can you explain what exactly is the market demand and what exactly the VLSI design engineers asking you in terms of features?

AM: I am going to cover 2 points. The 1st point is, design size and complexity has increased exponentially and so majority of the time the large portion of the design time is going into timing verification and simulation of the very complex circuits; that is one trend.
The 2nd trend is that - more and more people are looking for early and predictable design closure - what do we mean by early and predictable design closure is that they want to be able to asses most parameters very early, both RTL and pre RTL.
So very early in the design cycle they want to have a predictable flow - so they want to be able to floor them and - budget - and wanted to synthesize very accurately and aware of physical metrics.

Q: Can you explain how are the design tools changing when the design nodes are moving 45nm and less? Recently IBM has said design rules going to explode when it comes to 30 - 20 nm range, what are your observations on this?

AM: We find many customers already moving to 28nm and Magma is selected as flow of choice and we already looking at 22 nm. The new nodes further increase the complexity of design implementation challenge and number of changes with these design rules, people have to redesign number of their key IPs, that's one thing and the second thing is there is strong trend towards increase in the mixed signal proportion with in the design.

Q: what are your observations on India's semiconductor industry? Where exactly it is heading? Do you foresee great chips coming out of local Indian semiconductor design firms?

AM: The quality and complexity of the design being done in India is top notch - and they are working on the most challenging design being done anywhere in the world - so, what that means is that the expertise of working on the most challenging design is already in India and is growing. There are two effects of this trend - one, India is now playing a very strong influential role on both the tool and flow decisions for the large semiconductor companies as well as they are playing key role in success of semiconductor companies

Q: Can you also tell about local designers based in India, are they really growing?

AM: The expertise has grown to where they have the ability to work on the most complex designs and design problems of today and they now have strong position of influence towards the success of the MNCs. The second part of this trend is - you have seen the emergence of many IP and product companies, when we say IP, typically in a design, IP is the differentiating factor. In India the trend is - IP as well as many product companies have emerged. Let me give some examples - you see company like Sankhya - very strong products company, you have Sankalp Semiconductor and you have Ittiam. There is large number of such companies. Another company deserved to be mentioned is C2 Silicon started by Dr. Satya Gupta. C2 Silicon is a pure play design house.

Q: Excluding US Euorpe and Japan, what are the other top 3 markets by region for Magma?

AM: I don't yet have that information, if you were to look at the amount of design activities that's ongoing with in the MNCs in India, it could be India, Korea (South Korea) and Taiwan

Q:What about china?

AM: Tons of design going on in China using Magma - sort of- I would rather combine China and Taiwan.

Q: How does the cost of EDA tools matter in total SoC design cost?

AM: EDA tools makes significant impact on the success of a SoC design - but really EDA tools is a very small part of a SoC design cost. If you look at the SoC design cost, may be 40 to 60million, you are looking at the tool cost of only being no more than total of 3 to 5million (based on the node). Cost is not substantial but the benefit is very significant.

Q: What are the technologies nodes getting obsolete? You know nodes like 130 nm and bigger, what are the nodes getting useless now?

AM: I don't really think that number of nodes have become useless, I think that new production techniques like multi-chip module enable people to do their analog on a older process and digital on a newer process - so, I think there is still life left in 130 nm, 90 nm 65nm and I think those are still very much prevalent and I don't think they have become obsolete yet.

Q: For the fresh electronic engineers, what are your three points of suggestion on checklist basis to prepare the engineer for getting into VLSI design?

AM: VLSI design is still a very high value role, other fields like medical as well as green energy is making very attractive market. For the engineers I would say that they should adopt the latest technology that gives them an edge and look for markets like medical and energy for innovative applications - and the third one specific to India is, there is a market full of opportunities for indigenous products, I am aware of multiple projects ongoing which are taking in existing technologies and targeting it with the required changes to the India. That is very strong entrepreneurial opportunity.