Magma and ChipX Team to Deliver Unified RTL-to-GDSII Design Flow for Structured ASIC Platforms

Magma design flow supports ChipX CX5000 and future structured ASIC architectures

SANTA CLARA, Calif., September 14, 2004 - Magma® Design Automation Inc. (Nasdaq: LAVA), a provider of chip design solutions and ChipX, the structured ASIC leader, today announced the availability of a unified RTL-to-GDSII design flow based on Magma’s Blast Createâ„¢ and Blast Fusion®. The companies have worked together to test and customize the Magma flow to support the ChipX CX5000 family and future structured ASIC product families. The flow will be used by mutual customers and by ChipX to deliver low-cost structured ASIC designs or to migrate FPGA designs to ChipX’s structured ASIC platforms.

“ChipX has been offering structured ASICs since the mid-nineties,” said Elie Massabki, vice president of Marketing for ChipX. “After careful evaluation, we decided to partner with Magma to develop a structured ASIC design flow for our CX5000 and future families because its integrated RTL-to-GDSII system already offered most of the advanced capabilities we wanted. We’re excited to be able to offer our customers a state-of-the-art design flow that will accelerate their time-to-market.”

“Magma provides an integrated implementation solution for standard cell, structured ASIC and FPGA design within a common environment,” said Behrooz Zahiri, director of marketing for Magma. “We’re pleased to be working with the leading structured ASIC platform provider to offer our mutual customers a low-cost alternative to ASIC design that delivers high performance.”

<> ChipX Structured ASIC Flow with the Magma RTL-to-GDSII Design System

ChipX’s structured ASIC implementation flow for the CX5000 and future families will be based on Magma's integrated solution. The flow offers many advantages:

• Structure-specific optimizations to maximize utilization and performance.
• Advanced physical synthesis technology tailored for the ChipX architecture to handle physical site constraints and overlapping site locations. In this way, the system is able to select and efficiently place the correct implementation of a functional cell to meet design-specific requirements.
• Heterogeneous placement to simultaneously place cells and macros, including the placement of a large number of embedded and distributed memory blocks.
• Timing, power and signal integrity analysis integrated with synthesis, floorplanning, placement and routing, clock tree synthesis, physical timing optimization and RC extraction to ensure fast turnaround time and design closure.

ChipX will provide customers access to the flow and provide support.

<> ChipX to Present at MUSIC

On September 17th, Steve Bateman, vice president of Engineering at ChipX will present a paper at Magma’s third annual users group conference. The paper is entitled, “Structured ASIC Gears Up To Mainstream Design Flow.” The MUSIC conference will be held in Santa Clara, Calif. and is open to all Magma user companies. For more information, please visit www.magma-da.com/MUSIC. <>

About ChipX
ChipX is a leading manufacturer of late-stage programmable application-specific integrated circuits, or structured ASICs. The company's innovative, patented technology consolidates wafer production tooling, reduces time-to-market and minimizes the cost of initial production. ChipX's structured ASIC technology is widely used in communications, high-end consumer electronics, industrial control, medical equipment, automotive telematics, computing peripherals, and military/aerospace systems. Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, ChipX is a privately held corporation, founded in the U.S. in 1989. <>

About Magma Design Automation
Magma provides leading software for designing highly complex integrated circuits, by maximizing Quality of Results with respect to area, timing and power, while reducing overall design cycles and costs. Magma provides a complete RTL-to-GDSII design flow that includes design planning, prototyping, synthesis, place & route, and signal and power integrity chip design capabilities in a single executable, offering “The Fastest Path from RTL to Silicon”™. Magma’s software also includes products for advanced physical synthesis and architecture development tools for programmable logic devices (PLDs); capacitance extraction; and characterization and modeling. The company’s stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAVA. Visit Magma Design Automation on the Web at www.magma-da.com.

Magma and Blast Fusion are registered trademarks and Blast Create and “The Fastest Path from RTL to Silicon” are trademarks of Magma Design Automation Inc. All other product and company names are trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Forward-looking statements:

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters set forth in this press release, including statements about the features and benefits of the Magma flow for the ChipX 5000 and future product families and that customers and ChipX will use the flow for structured ASIC design and/or to migrate FPGA designs to ChipX’s structured ASIC platform are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially including, but not limited to, Magma’s and ChipX’s decisions to continue working together, their products’ abilities to produce the desired results and the companies’ abilities to keep pace with rapidly changing technology. Further discussion of these and other potential risk factors may be found in Magma's public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov). Magma undertakes no additional obligation to update these forward-looking statements.