About MMI

Mission:

Micro Magic, Inc.'s mission is to dramatically reduce the time and cost required to produce high-performance SoC designs.

Micro Magic was founded in January of 1995. The founders worked together at SUN Microsystems. While at SUN they worked on several projects including a 900ps 16Kbyte cache SRAM, the SPARC V9 architecture definition, and led a team to develop a 300MHz SPARC Microprocessor. The rest of the core design team consists of senior designers from companies like HP, SGI, and DEC. Most have Ph.D.'s from Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT and average almost 20 years of industry experience.

After only five years, our strong engineering portfolio led to Micro Magic, Inc. being acquired in December 2000 for $260 million. Then in May of 2004 the founders of Micro Magic restarted the company.

"Having been a designer struggling to do my job with inadequate tools, I had a burning desire to fundamentally improve the way the industry designs chips" says Mark Santoro, CEO of Micro Magic. "We made a great start the first time around but there was still a lot more to do. Both my original team and I felt compelled to finish what we had started, thus we made the decision to restart the company in May 2004 and committed ourselves to finishing the job."

During the next two years the original development team went into "stealth" mode where they completely revised Micro Magic's suite of EDA tools.

Today Micro Magic, Inc. (MMI) is back offering its world class
design tools and design services for those who need
the best in high-performance and low power chips.

Micro Magic, Inc. is a privately held company.
We build, use and sell our own high-end CAD tools.
Our installed base is growing and we enjoy a positive cash flow.

Founder: Mark Santoro

Mark Santoro, PhD

Co-Founder and President
PhD Stanford 1990
Invented 4:2 trees
Born Florida 1957
He holds 9 patents and loves his dogs.
After working for such companies as Vector General, Weitek, Apple Computer & Sun Microsystems Dr. Santoro cofounded MMI in Jan 1995, where he served as President & CEO.
Dr Santoro invented 4:2 trees as part of his PhD dissertation which are used in most modern multiplier architectures.

Founder: Lee Tavrow

Lee Tavrow, PhD

Co-Founder and Chief Engineer
PhD MIT 1991
Born California 1964
He holds 13 patents, but still seems lucky.
After working at Digital Equipment Corporation & Sun Microsystems, Dr. Tavrow cofounded Micro Magic as Vice President and chief engineer.

A Sample of MMI Successes

• Ternary CAM with Embedded Processor
• Network Processor
• VoIP Processor
• Embedded High Speed SRAM
• Custom Register File
• Low Power Memory
• 26-Million-Transistor Processor.

How We Work

Engineers from Micro Magic meet with your engineers and management, to discuss the best solution to the problem or problems in the chip design. Some issues are smaller, and more easily remedied; some are larger and will require more involvement. Micro Magic's intention is to provide the most efficient solution utilizing your current design flow and our development tools. Our engineers can either do the work off-site, in house, or provide the MMI tool(s) and advice for a plug-n-play augmentation to your existing flow.

Points of Interest

Trying to achieve the performance we needed from commercially-available tools just wasn't working. Over the course of several years, Micro Magic's engineers wound up writing their own tools to help get chips out. Our design services history is unmatched for making tapeout on time. Of course, our clients began to notice that MMI engineers were more efficient, more productive, and started asking about the tools. We responded by making them available to other engineers,and in 1995 the first versions of MAX and SUE were ready for the public..

Micro Magic, Inc.

Micro Magic, Inc. Corporate Information