( ESNUG 481 Item 9 ) -------------------------------------------- [04/27/09]
Subject: Gabe interviews Rajeev after his recent MUSIC 2009 keynote address
From: Gabe Moretti <gmoretti=user domain=gabeoneda not calm>
Hi, John,
Rajeev Madhavan, CEO of Magma, titled his keynote speech at the recently
concluded MUSIC event in San Jose: "Start Me Up - Back to Basics". I spoke
with Rajeev afterwards.
After about one year of financial (and in some cases technical) hardship,
Magma is beginning to come out of the slump. "The company did lose some
of its direction and true identity during the legal proceedings it had to
go through," said Rajeev. He freely takes the blame for this, but the
hard times have re-invigorated his entrepreneurial spirit and the company
is now behaving very much like a start-up, but with much more resources
than a brand-new enterprise.
Rajeev believes a single feature is less important than the productivity of
the tool in total. For a short period of time, the company focused on
adding features to the products without really considering the benefit to
the general users. The entire flow, how you get from one design
representation to another is what is important, not the niceties a tool
might offer.
Magma has shed some of the peripheral products that targeted markets with
a total value of less than $50 million, according to Rajeev, and has focused
all of its resources on three major areas:
- digital design
- analog design
- mixed-signal design
Rajeev sees mixed-signal as the market that offers the best opportunities
to his company.
The most fundamental switch in the marketing approach is to a company whose
tools integrate seamlessly with those of the competition. It is not just
official standards that matter, it is the de-facto ones as well. Thus Magma
products now accept, or will soon, practically all of the data and scripts
formats used by IC designers, a situation that helps significantly in
implementing the strategy Rajeev has developed to maintain and increase the
company's market share.
In the digital design market, Magma is targeting leading-edge process nodes
and designs. Its aim is to deliver a flow that is as much push button as
possible. The company is approaching analog design using the model-based
approach pioneered by The Mathworks. Designers can use schematics from
Cadence Virtuoso, the de facto standard schematics editor in this field, or
equations to describe components of an analog circuit without having to
solely deal with the details of a SPICE deck.
Although both its digital design and circuit simulation flows are very
competitive, Magma is focusing on mixed-signal designs. The company is
following the lead of Texas Instruments, one of its most important
customers, and has developed a highly automated flow to support designers
developing mixed-signal devices. Magma wants to become the leader in the
mixed-signal market. The figure below shows the full flow for a mixed
-signal design implementation.
Magma is involved in a number of "shadow designs" providing a true benchmark
of its tools capabilities versus the ones currently used in production. The
results will prove to potential customers the advantages of Magma's products
over the competition, according to Rajeev. This activity is both time
consuming and expensive, and thus executives have decided that this year
Magma will not exhibit at DAC (but we are still a few months away...)
He is convinced design engineers are the key audience for the resurgence
of Magma, and to convince them shadow designs are what is needed. Working
on actual designs allows engineers to appreciate the characteristics of the
products upon which Magma is building its new growth.
On the preferred vendor status Synopsys seeks with its customers, Rajeev says
that such a status does not hurt his sales chances. Users take the money
saved from "eat-all" discounted license deals to purchase Magma's products,
since they are priced in a very competitive way.
Magma is focused on the two product releases scheduled for this year: one in
May and one in September. As for the number of rumors floating in the EDA
space, Rajeev is not interested in addressing them. His focus is to find
new opportunities for prospect specific presentations and competitive
analysis that show the improvements in quality and time to market that can
be had using Magma's products.
- Gabe Moretti
GabeOnEDA.com Venice, FL
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