Magma’s Silicon One solutions for emerging silicon address challenges of chip design in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: Magma Design Automation formally introduced its Silicon One technology solutions for emerging silicon to Magma users in India.

MUSIC (Magma Users Summit on Integrated Circuits) is dedicated to providing an open forum for users to share and exchange ideas on how they use Magma solutions to meet the challenges of IC and SoC design. Magma’s Silicon One solutions bring focus to making silicon profitable for customers by providing differentiated solutions and technologies that address business imperatives facing semiconductor makers today – time to market, product differentiation, cost, power and performance.

In a keynote presentation, Rajeev Madhavan, chairman and CEO of Magma, described a trend towards vertical integration where electronics companies such as Apple and Google aggregate software, silicon and services to gain tighter control over the quality of the electronic products and ultimately, the customer experience.

Greater vertical integration in electronics manufacturing requires greater silicon integration of complex analog and digital technology. Madhavan explained how, through Silicon One, Magma supports this trend by providing advanced digital design, digital sign-off, analog design, analog verification and yield management capabilities that address the time-to-market, product differentiation, cost, power and performance requirements of semiconductors.

Madhavan sees great potential for the India semiconductor industry to take advantage of this trend. “While the global semiconductor market has experienced a decline in recent years, the Indian market has grown,” said Madhavan. “The ever-increasing silicon integration challenges are creating more market opportunities for semiconductor suppliers that can provide front-to-back solutions. With Silicon One, Magma provides the India semiconductor industry the solutions it needs today to ensure its continued growth.”

Silicon One: Technology solutions for emerging silicon
Silicon One’s initial focus is on three types of devices that are key to electronic products that are most prevalent today:

Analog/Mixed-Signal (AMS): The exponential growth of the wireless market has dramatically accelerated the need for more advanced analog/mixed-signal designs. Key critical analog blocks are increasing in AMS chips while the digital content is also growing to accommodate increased control functions. The latest generation of AMS designs resemble SoC devices – they are large, complex, and are created using more advanced process nodes.

Memory: The proliferating use of SRAM, DRAM, Flash and image sensors in smartphones, cameras, tablets, notebooks, etc. has created one of the most competitive markets in terms of cost and time to market. The key concerns of these customers are high reliability memory chips (every bit of memory must work) at the lowest possible cost.

System-on-Chip (SoC): Today’s state-of-the-art SoC designs integrate everything – digital (including multiple processing cores and hardware accelerators), analog, mixed-signal, and memory – together on a single chip. The result is that SoCs are among the most challenging and complex designs, but they enable the integration of many functions and provide the lower component cost, lower power consumption, and higher processing throughput demanded by the most advanced end-applications.