Industry Expert Blogs

This time last year, we were in the middle of selling Altos Design Automation. Altos had listened to its customers and realized that memory and standard cell characterization had become a huge problem, thus an opportunity. Their first large customer was Virage, whose product at nodes below 45 nm required at least four times the amount of characterization of earlier nodes. Altos changed their emphasis from statistical static timing to characterization as a result.

This shift also gave us a somewhat unique vantage point to watch the havoc Magma was causing in the Spice market with FineSim. Synopsys up until 45 nm had an uncontested franchise in the memory and standard cell characterization market. Magma had captured a huge amount of sales directly from Synopsys in the memory characterization market segment, which is the largest and fastest growing part of the Spice market. From my perspective, Synopsys had to do something to stop the bleeding. Altos ending up at Cadence limited the field of opportunities and, at least from my perspective, it wasn't obvious that they could buy themselves out of their problem.

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