Flextronics licenses Magma's Blast Fusion

IC design services provider Flextronics Semiconductor has licensed Magma Design Automation Inc.'s Blast Fusion physical design system. The licensing agreement is expected to allow Flextronics to provide skilled design services to its customers for the implementation of complex, deep submicron SoCs using Magma software.

According to a Flextronics spokesperson, the company has already realized the turnaround time advantages of Magma's solution during the evaluation. A Flextronics designer completed a 500,000-gate customer design targeted for a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) process using Blast Fusion.

The designer attributed the rapid design process to Blast Fusion's intuitive flow and the tool's help in identifying and eliminating routing congestion that would have made it almost impossible to complete the chip. After making the minor floorplan changes Blast Fusion recommended, Flextronics was able to achieve timing closure without any layout-to-synthesis iterations.