( ESNUG 462 Item 1 ) -------------------------------------------- [02/15/07]
Subject: Questions for Rajeev Madhavan, CEO of Magma
Why doesn't Magma have any high-speed customers like Qualcomm, Philips,
Intel? If required speeds are over 600 MHz, you don't show up.
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Raj: how is work going on the Bonn router and when (or will) customers be
getting builds with it in?
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Multi-CPU machines have been available for several years now. When will
there be a multi-CPU version of Fusion (placer, timer, extraction, router,
optimization) available?
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Rajeev, with such "superior" tools over Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor, why
is your growth in marketshare stalled?
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Rajeev Madhavan: Every time anyone talks to you about your products, you
tell them you are the best and there is nothing like it in the market. So,
why don't you own 100% of the market?
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Rajeev - You have said in interviews saying "DFM" is "Design for Marketing".
Is that Magma's stance, too?
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For Rajeev Madhavan - Magma
Is Magma developing a System Verilog simulator? Why or why not?
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What's your strategy for making money in the FPGA EDA business? Other
ASIC focused companies, including Cadence and Synopsys turned tail and
ran. Are you making a similar mistake?
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Blast FPGA, a "coming soon" demo on deepchip, what else?
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Question for Magma:
1. Why doesn't Magma improve their documentations, and why is their flow
not yet stable, after remining in the industry for so many years, why
does it still has issues? Every time we try to do something new, try
to develop some new flow, we get hit by Magma tool limitations which
hits back painfully.
2. Why doesn't Magma try to integrate products in its porfolio, like
Cross domain clock crossing flow, Auto identification of MCP and
False path?
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To Magma: When are you going to get serious about test and DFT?
Follow-up depending on his response: Why don't you buy LogicVision
before Mentor does.
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Since LAVA is late in the game for TEST, how is LAVA going to compete with
MENT & SNPS who already have well established TEST solution. MENT Fastscan
and TestKompress is doing very well and SNPS TetraMAX and DFTMax seems like
catching up, but not quite yet. CDNS had acquired the TEST solution from
IBM, but not much progress was noted in the past few years.
Rajeev, don't you think partnering with MENT may be a better solution than
developing from scratch?
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Q: Do you have a chance of survival now that you have lost critical patent
ownership?
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Rajeev: What is Magma's plan to improve the link between Volcano data base
and Open Access?
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Your Quartz physical verification tool is brand new. The command syntax is
quite different from Calibre. If you don't provide any easy conversion
programs or assists, how do you think you can get quick adaption, not to
mention the customer QA cycles?
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What is happening with Quartz DRC & LVS? Is it ready for production? Who
can testify about the tool performance vs. Calibre? There was yet another
demo and the feature list at DAC 2006 -- but no happy customers who are
willing to talk?
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Why did Hamid Savoj leave Magma? He was a co-founder of Magma in 1997. He
started as a principal engineer ended as Senior Vice President, Product
Development. He recently joined Envision Technology, which is a kind of
interesting stealth-mode company, in Q4 (I think) 2006 as VP Engineering.
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This question is for Rajeev Madhavan - CEO of Magma. Are there plans for
something like a wrapper for the Magma tools that would enable major
stakeholders in Synopsys to use their current Synopsys scripts and
changeover a full environment to Magma with little risk or loss of time?
Our biggest problem with changing tools is infrastructure.
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Now that some of the patent fight is behind Magma, are there any plans to
gain ASIC synthesis market (a competitve tool to displace Design Compiler.)
It can definitiely help medium sized ASIC design companies to have
different design flows with better customer service.
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How much is it true that after all patent fights are over, there might be
a M & M (Mentor & Magma -- which color, not sure) EDA company?
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It's not too late; why NOT merge with Mentor and strive to become even the
#1 player in the EDA market?
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Ask Rajeev Madhavan why he's spending millions of $$$ on fighting Synopsys
over patents when the patents are almost 100% trivial and long-well-known
aspects of doing partitioning and layout, supposedly timing driven or not.
I would urge you go into the EE Times reports over the 3 patents and take
a quick look at the claims - They are all stuff that's been done for years,
including back in the 70s and early 80s, long before there was commercial
EDA like Cadence, Synopsys, and Magma. They were all written by a guy who
saw the strictly-defensive technique at IBM of writing patent disclosures
about everything you do just to make sure you have a patent to horse trade
if you are ever challenged in the market place. But those 3 patents are
really ridiculous to spend money on. Doesn't Rajeev realize Magma patent
people can just look at old DAC/ICCAD/ISPD proceedings and early books on
physical partitioning and layout and find it all there... Or he can just
quietly ask Brian Preas (he's on the DAC board and he and his Kathy publish
the DAC proceedings on CDROM for the ACM... but he's been in PD EDA since
at least the early 80's/late-70's.)
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To Magma and Synopsys --- what do you think are the fallout of the legal
battle? If Magma loses the appeal, what are its backup plans? If Synopsys
loses, what are its backup plans?
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My question is for Rajeev Madhavan - CEO Magma
What do the patent cases with Synopsys really mean to him? Is it something
personal? Or is he doing it for the good of the community? It can't be for
the good of the community because when IBM decided not to fight Magma, the
folks said it's a good thing to stop litigations and focus on meeting
customer requirements.
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Lawyers are more expensive than engineers. How much innovation are the
customers losing by the patent fight? What if you lose the fight?
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Raj/Antun:
Can you both agree today to drop the lawsuit, shake hands, and stop wasting
each others times and focus on making better tools?
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Rajeev, what is your reaction about Cadence Power Forward Initiative (PFI)?
What I am aware of is that Magma is also trying to do the same stuff but
why? Cadence has already open sourced the common power format in Si2 and
Magma is a part of Si2.
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How does Magma plan to tackle the advanced processes having RC dominated
paths, with respect to the Fixed Timing Methodology (FTM) of super cells?
FTM highly depends on lib cell granularity, linearity and characterization.
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Why has Molten had minimum success, while Synopsys SolveNet is very
successful? It lets us rely less on Synopsys AEs to answer questions?
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