The Hindu Business Line : Magma goes 3-D in chip analysis

Bangalore, Jan. 25 The US-based leader in end-to-end electronic design automation (EDA), that has a strong India-based development arm, has deployed the third dimension for the task of failure analysis of integrated chip design. Engineers who attended the annual Magma Users Summit on Integrated Circuits (MUSIC), here, were told that the company’s Knights Camelot failure analysis software for computer aided design (CAD) had been beefed up with 3-D options which made it easier to debug and fix design flaws.

The conference threw the spotlight on the huge opportunity that awaited Indian engineers specialising in electronic CAD. The role of the Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) lab of the computer science department of IIT-Madras came in for particular praise. Lab head and Associate Professor Dr V. Kamakoti, announced that the circuit design group had placed its entire study material on the Web as part of the 7-IIT-and -Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore) initiative known as the National Programme on Technology-Enhanced Learning ( http://nptel.iitm.ac.in ). Most recently it had created a module called ‘Magma for You in Three Hours ’, which enabled students to access and use Magma EDA learning resources at one stop.

“The VLSI Lab at IIT -Madras, turns out some of the finest engineers - they are able to work in any EDA environment including cutting edge applications like multicore and 45 nanometer,” said Magma India’s Managing Director, Mr Anand Anandkumar.

Major chip makers such as Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Broadcom were Magma users and the conference drew a record 47 technical papers from these and other industry users.

A key supporter of the conference – the UK-based ARM – also achieved a milestone on Wednesday: its partners had shipped more than 10 billion computing cores. This comes 17 years after ARM created the first ARM processor, a reduced instruction set or RISC ’machine’. ARM cores are used in a variety of devices from Nokia and Sony phones to Kodak cameras to Seagate and Samsung hard drives.

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