Press Releases

SMIC and Magma Forge Design Service Partnership to Offer Integrated RTL-to-GDSII Design Solution and Services for Nanometer Processes

28 Jun 2005

 
Shanghai, China  [2005-06-28]

SHANGHAI, China and SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 28, 2005 - Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation - SMIC (NYSE: SMI and HKSE: 981) and Magma® Design Automation Inc. (Nasdaq: LAVA) today announced a formal partnership between the two companies. SMIC's Design Service Division is adopting Magma's highly productive integrated RTL-to-GDSII design solution - including Blast Create™, Blast Plan™ Pro, Blast Fusion® and Blast Power™ - for its ASIC design projects, as well as the SiliconSmart® products for characterization and model creation of libraries and macros. To ensure successful adoption, a Magma support team will be on site at SMIC. Using an experienced design service team and a suite of proven design tools, mutual customers can implement system-on-chip (SoC) designs quickly and consistently.

"We are impressed by the way Magma's integrated solution enabled us to take a design from netlist to GDSII quickly," said Paul Ouyang, vice president of Design Services of SMIC. "As design complexity and time-to-market pressures increase, we find that an inherently integrated flow that delivers better results is critical. With its unified datamodel, Magma provides tight integration and enables our engineers to communicate more easily with the customer, allowing us to quickly finish the design."

"Magma is pleased that the one of the leading foundries in the world is leveraging the Magma technology to create supply chain solutions that will contribute to SMIC's growth," said Michael Ma, vice president, Foundry and IP Relationships for Magma. "SMIC's adoption of our industry-leading IC implementation solution and comprehensive library characterization capabilities demonstrate the crucial role Magma technology plays in the deployment of silicon manufacturing processes."

Magma's Integrated RTL-to-GDSII Solution for Nanometer Designs
Each component of the Magma system is based on a unified data model and uses the same timing, power and signal integrity analysis and optimization engines. As a result, the Magma system provides an accurate and highly integrated IC implementation solution that allows designers to address key nanometer design issues such as on-chip variation (OCV) considerations, complex physical design rules and noise avoidance during implementation. By providing concurrent optimization within a unified environment, the Magma system helps designers to achieve performance goals and meet delivery schedules.

Blast Create, Blast Plan Pro, Blast Power and Blast Fusion are the key components of the tightly integrated Magma system. Blast Create is a predictable RTL-to-placed gates solution that enables designers to determine whether their design will meet timing prior to handing it off to layout. The high-capacity hierarchical design planning and prototyping capabilities in Blast Plan Pro enable designers to minimize the cycle time for top-level analysis and optimization on large and complex designs. Blast Plan Pro leverages Magma's unique GlassBox™ modeling technology to retain the relevant timing information in each block, allowing full optimization with minimal data. Blast Power leverages embedded power, timing and voltage drop analysis to enable on-the-fly power versus timing trade-offs without having to leave the implementation system, ensuring rapid convergence. Blast Fusion is a fast physical design system for advanced methodologies and nanometer process technologies. It provides advanced analysis and optimization capabilities for designing high-performance, low-power designs. Blast Fusion enables rapid design closure, taking into account new nanometer design challenges such as OCV.

About SMIC
SMIC (NYSE: SMI, SEHK: 0981.HK) is one of the leading semiconductor foundries in the world, providing integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing at 0.35-micron to 0.11-micron and finer line technologies to customers worldwide. Established in 2000, SMIC has four 8-inch wafer fabrication facilities in volume production in Shanghai and Tianjin. In the first quarter of 2005, SMIC commenced commercial production at its 12-inch wafer fabrication facility in Beijing. SMIC also maintains customer service and marketing offices in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and a representative office in Hong Kong. As part of its dedication towards providing high-quality services, SMIC strives to comply with or exceed international standards and has achieved ISO9001, ISO/TS16949, OHSAS18001, TL9000, and ISO14001 certifications. For additional information, please visit http://www.smics.com.

About Magma
Magma provides leading software for designing highly complex integrated circuits while maximizing Quality of Results with respect to area, timing and power, and at the same time reducing overall design cycles and costs. Magma provides a complete RTL-to-GDSII design flow that includes prototyping, synthesis, place & route, and signal and power integrity chip design capabilities, capacitance extraction, design for test (DFT), physical verification (DRC/LVS), static and statistical timing analysis, and characterization and modeling in a single executable, offering "The Fastest Path from RTL to Silicon"™. Magma's software also includes products for advanced logical, physical synthesis and architecture development tools for programmable logic devices (PLDs), FPGAs and Structured ASICs; capacitance extraction; and characterization and modeling. The company's stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAVA. Visit Magma Design Automation on the Web at www.magma-da.com.