Gary Smith EDA Consulting in Electronic Design
Gary Smith EDA (GSEDA) is the leading provider of market intelligence and advisory services for the global Electronic Design Automation (EDA), Electronic System Level (ESL) design, and related technology markets.
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Synopsys/ Magma - Great Acquisition, Difficult MergerSynopsys/ Magma - Great Acquisition, Difficult Merger
Synopsys’ announced acquisition of Magma should be no big surprise to anyone. Earlier this year we predicted that there would be one or two acquisitions in the ASIC Layout space. There were five contenders and stability, in an EDA sub-application market, is three. On the Synopsys side it is their most important acquisition since the Avanti merger; but I don’t know if this is a good thing for Magma; only time will tell.
For Synopsys the acquisition fills in a lot of holes that have appeared in the Synopsys tool set over the last five years. Synopsys and Magma introduced their analog/custom tools, Galaxy Custom Designer and Titan, a few years back. Magma’s tool took off the Synopsys tools didn’t. Magma has a competitive DRC engine Quartz; Synopsys doesn’t. Magma has introduced a superior SPICE simulator FinSim, which is taking business from Synopsys. Magma’s Talus ASIC Layout tools have been taking business from Synopsys. Synopsys has stressed their tool’s superior integration; Magma has actually achieved superior tool integration. Magma introduced a superior Static Timing Analyzer Tekton, which is taking business from Synopsys.
The static timing analyzer will be a big issue with the customer base. With their recent acquisition of Extreme DA, and now Magma, Synopsys has regained their Franchise position in the important Static Timing market. This is not a good thing for the design engineer. Only competition drives tool improvements.
As far as R&D teams are concerned; Magma brags that they can achieve better results with a five man team than Synopsys can with a fifty man team, and recently they have been proving their point. Trying to merge these two teams will be the major challenge. Right now it’s a 50/50 bet that Synopsys won’t be able to do it.
Not long ago Synopsys prided itself on their superior R&D organization; now they stress single vendor tool flow (i.e. bundling) reminiscent of Cadences sales approach in the last years of their holding the number one position in EDA. If they don’t do a better job in keeping the Magma R&D team, than they did with the Avanti R&D team, they will soon see a group of start-ups developing superior tools manned by ex-Magma employees. Within five years that will put Synopsys pretty much back where they were before the merger.
To view entire paper, download the PDF here
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EDP Symposium in Monterey
Thur Apr 05, 2012
Chip & systems design
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DV Con "Big Wigs" Panel
Tues Feb 28, 2012 2:30-3:30
Resurgence of Chip Design
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Comments
On the sim side, our our large simulations (>100G memory footprint) we used to use VCS because nothing beat it both in memory/run time, but in the past three years Questa has really caught up and we've been using that exclusively. It seemed like Synopsys was stagnant. I am surprised Mentor didn't buy Magma.
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Challenge will always be first and foremost integration of talent and teams over survivability of any technology pieces. Most Cos. do a poor job in this space. Clearly Cisco has this down to an art. EDA would do well to understand their model.