Fact Sheet

Micro Magic, Inc provides tools, services, and intellectual property (IP) for the design of high-speed, low-power SoCs. The company's mission is to help designers dramatically reduce the time and cost required to produce high-performance SoC designs. Micro Magic finds new solutions to IC design problems, rather than simply improving on old solutions.

History

A private, self-funded company, Micro Magic was founded in January 1995 by experienced IC designers from Sun Microsystems, Apple, Silicon Graphics, Hewlett-Packard, DEC Computers, and other companies to design high-performance processors. Finding that the current design tools were inadequate for building large, high-performance chips in record time with small teams, the Micro Magic designers developed their own internal tools. The software worked so successfully that the company began selling the tools as well as their design services in 1999.

In December of 2000 Micro Magic was acquired for $260 million. The original founders of the company, however, believed that there was still much work to do on product development, and in May 2004 the same original Micro Magic team restarted the company with the commitment to enhance the tools and reintroduce them into the market. In June 2006 the revised tools were introduced to the market.

Products and Services

Micro Magic's advanced EDA tools and methodologies are for design teams who need full-custom performance within ASIC timeframes. The tools are used to design the datapaths and memory subsystems associated with all types of processors, including DSPs, embedded controllers, multi-media, and network, graphics, and microprocessors. Micro Magic's integrated logical and physical design system is for designers who must quickly achieve timing convergence in designs with high computational complexity at high clock frequencies within minimal area using the smallest process geometries.

In addition to EDA software development and support, contract IC design on high-speed and low-power designs has always been an important element of the Micro Magic business model. Micro Magic engineering services provide complete chip designs, high-performance processor cores, datapaths, memories, and cell libraries.

The redesigned and enhanced suite of Micro Magic tools includes:

• MAX, an easy-to-use, full-featured layout editor that features real-time design rule check (DRC), schematic-driven layout, and interactive cross-probing between layout and schematic. MAX is 50X faster than the leading competitor. In a recent test on a 4Gbyte GDSII file, MAX was able to redisplay the entire chip with all layers visible in less than one second.
  
  
• SUE, a design environment and schematic capture tool that controls the entire design flow, including third-party point tools, as well as providing schematic capture and entry. SUE can also drive SPICE and Verilog simulators.
  
  
• DPC (DataPath Compiler), a specialized tool for optimizing high-speed datapaths. Designs optimized by DPC are typically 3X faster and 40% smaller than typical application-specific ICs (ASICs) designed with standard ASIC flows.
  
  
• MCC (MegaCell Compiler), a specialized tool for designing memories such as static random access memory (SRAMs), dynamic RAMs (DRAMs), read-only memory (ROMs), content-addressable memory (CAMs), pad rings, or any other regular or semi-regular structure. MCC generates these designs in minutes and can help verify them as well.

Corporate Facts

• Co-founder and CEO - Mark Santoro, Ph.D.
• Co-founder and chief engineer - Lee Tavrow, Ph.D.
• Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California
• 11 employees