> Last night, Rajeev laughed at the idea of Magma acquiring SiCanvas, but he
> did heavily hint at the fact his Magma developers were working on their
> own custom layout tools to directly take on the Cadence Virtuoso monopoly.
> Nothing offical yet, just big obvious elephant-in-the-living-room hints.
>
>     - from http://www.deepchip.com/wiretap/070606.html


From: [ Milli Vanilli ]

Hi, John,

Keep me anon.

I wonder if Magma's "own custom layout tool" is a variant on "buy vs. make".
Inside Magma's recent Form 10-K/A filed on 4/4/2007, I noticed:

   "On May 3, 2006, we acquired a license to technology relating to
    electronic design automation from Stabie-Soft, Inc.  We paid $2.5
    million for the license upon close of the transaction.  We also
    agreed to pay up to $0.5 million in cash in additional license
    fees based upon achievement of certain milestones."

The details are lacking, but the emphasis of Stabie-Soft (basically that's
just Mike Stabenfeldt, a 1-man EDA shop based in Austin, TX) has always
appeared to be on tools associated with Slam-Edit, a layout editor.  But
this $2.5 M with $0.5 M kicker is a fairly tidy sum (compared to the current
Stabie-Soft product pricing) so I imagine Magma may have purchased access to
more than just some layout editor "technology".

What do you think?

    - [ Milli Vanilli ]