Micro Magic Back in Business With Revised Suite of Tools

Original Team Has Re-Formed the Company and is Offering Radically Enhanced Software for the Design of SoCs

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--May 29, 2006--After being acquired in December 2000 for $260 million, the founders of Micro Magic, Inc. today announced that they have restarted the company and that the original development team has completely revised it's suite of electronic design automation (EDA) tools for the design of high-speed, low-power systems-on-chips (SoCs). The company will also restart its custom design services. Micro Magic software tools help high-speed digital and analog designers quickly solve the difficult technical problems posed by the production of high-capacity, fast, complex, integrated circuits (ICs).

"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," said 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."

The first step for the reunited Micro Magic team was to radically update and enhance their existing EDA software suite. This "stealth mode" period of revision and testing lasted two years, and the new versions of these tools, having been fully tested by Micro Magic engineers and a small group of trusted customers, are now ready for release.

"Every one of our tool developers at Micro Magic has worked on production silicon," Mark continued, "We know what we're doing and we know what designers need because we've been in their shoes. We use the software internally for our own design projects, and therefore we know it works right before even our early customers see the tools."

Micro Magic's customer list includes some of the largest microprocessor companies in the world, as well as smaller fabless semiconductor companies. More than 100 successful chips have taped out with Micro Magic tools since they were first developed.

The redesigned and enhanced suite of Micro Magic tools includes:

• MAX, an easy-to-use, full-featured layout editor that provides real-time design rule checking (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 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 the same design implemented 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.

Part of Micro Magic's philosophy is to support open standards and interoperability, enabling users to develop their own customized tool flows. All of the company's tools feature a tool command language (TCL) interface and application programming interface (API). All databases are ASCII based, and are freely accessible by the user.

Contract IC design on high-speed and low-power designs has always been an important element of the Micro Magic business model, and the company plans to be active in this market again. "We only take on challenging projects that appeal to our designers," commented Santoro. "Last time we had a year-long waiting list, and we expect equally strong demand for our IC design services today, given the current state of the industry."

Micro Magic will be exhibiting at the 2006 Design Automation Conference in San Francisco, CA, July 24-28 at Booth 2318.

Pricing and Availability

The entire suite of redesigned Micro Magic products is available immediately. Prices start at $30,000 per tool for an annual license. The software operates on the Linux platform. Call 408-414-7647 ext. 202 for more information, or visit www.micromagic.com.

About Micro Magic, Inc.

Micro Magic, Inc., a private, self-funded company, 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.

Micro Magic's advanced EDA tools are built by IC designers for IC designers. They can handle any size design, are production-proven, and are easy to learn. The company's products have been used to design the datapaths and memory subsystems associated with all types of SoCs, including microprocessors, DSPs, embedded controllers, and multi-media, network, and graphics chips. Micro Magic's integrated logical and physical design system is for designers who must quickly achieve timing convergence for designs with high computational complexity, at high clock frequencies, within a minimal area, using the smallest process geometries. For more information about Micro Magic and its products, please visit www.micromagic.com or call 408-414-7647.