SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 29, 2011 -Magma® Design Automation Inc. Magma® Design Automation Inc. (Nasdaq: LAVA), a provider of chip design software, today announced that since its release 18 months ago, Tekton has grown its customer base to more than 25 companies, achieving the fastest adoption rate of any tool in the company’s history. Tekton, the most advanced sign-off-quality static timing analysis (STA) tool on the market, was introduced to the industry in the spring of 2010. This unprecedented growth was accomplished despite the chip industry’s shrinking electronic design automation (EDA) budgets and designers’ historical unwillingness to change sign-off tools.

“Tekton has garnered strong customer interest for multiple reasons,” said Jacob Avidan, general manager of Magma’s Digital Sign-Off Business Unit. “First and foremost, the need for faster runtimes and true multi-mode, multi-corner (MMMC) sign-off is not being met by legacy tools today. Second, Tekton’s superior architecture, which was designed specifically for multi-core processing and concurrent MMMC analysis, has been proven on production designs. And third, customer confidence is high in Magma’s ability to sustain its performance and technology leadership in timing sign-off solutions.”

Customers are using Tekton to accelerate post place-and-route engineering change order (ECO) loops as well as for final sign-off runs. With the slow runtimes of legacy tools and the increasing number of scenarios that need to be analyzed, today’s timing closure phase can take two to three months to complete. Tekton’s concurrent MMMC analysis and multi-threaded architecture can save tens – if not hundreds – of hours over the span of numerous ECO loops. Tekton also provides a huge savings in hardware costs for MMMC analysis. Recent customer results show savings between 75 and 95 percent of machine-count usage for running large numbers of scenarios. With fast and sign-off-accurate results in the ECO flow, customers can have confidence in using Tekton for final timing sign-off analysis and eliminate the need for additional STA point tools.

Tekton’s customers range from the largest networking and mobile broadband design houses to some of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers. More than half of the top 20 IDMs and fabless semiconductor companies are committed to using Tekton. “The diversity of customers using Tekton has driven our R&D and support resources to produce a robust tool that works across a broad range of design styles and technology nodes including advanced nodes such as 28 and 20 nanometer. This diversity has also driven continued development to maintain Tekton’s competitive edge over other STA tools,” Avidan added. “In the last 9 months alone, Tekton’s runtime has been improved by over 2X while maintaining the same sign-off accuracy.”

Tekton was developed as part of a fully integrated system that includes extraction sign-off and place-and-route capabilities that use the same data base and are MMMC aware. This allows the platform engines to work simultaneously and to achieve higher quality of results and throughput compared to competitive point-tool solutions.

About Magma
Leading semiconductor companies worldwide use Magma’s electronic design automation (EDA) software to produce chips for a wide variety of vertical markets including tablet computing, mobile devices, electronic games, digital video, networking, military/aerospace and memory. Silicon One, Magma’s technology solutions for emerging silicon, address time to market, product differentiation, cost and performance while making silicon more profitable. Magma products include software for digital design, analog implementation, mixed-signal design, physical verification, circuit simulation, characterization and yield management. The company maintains headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and offices throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Asia and India. Magma’s stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAVA. Follow Magma on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/MagmaEDA and on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/Magma. Visit Magma Design Automation on the Web at www.magma-da.com

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Magma is a registered trademark and Tekton is a trademark of Magma Design Automation Inc. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Forward-Looking Statements:
Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters set forth in this press release, including statements that Tekton offers fast, accurate timing analysis, and other statements about the features and benefits of Magma products, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially including, but not limited to Magma’s ability to keep pace with rapidly changing technology; and the company’s products’ abilities to produce desired results. Further discussion of these and other potential risk factors may be found in Magma's public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov). Magma undertakes no additional obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

Contacts:
Magma Design Automation Inc.
Monica Marmie
Director, Corporate Marketing
(408) 565-7689
mmarmie[at]magma-da[dot]com

Nicky Denovan
Magma Press Relations, Europe
EvokedSet
Tel: +44 7747 017654
Email: nicky[at]evokedset[dot]com
 
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