Exar Selects Magma’s Tekton and QCP to Accelerate Sign-Off of 40-nm SoCs

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 21, 2011 - Magma® Design Automation. (Nasdaq: LAVA), a provider of chip design software, today announced Exar Corporation (Nasdaq: EXAR) has adopted the Tekton™ static timing analysis and QCP™ extraction software to accelerate sign-off and engineering change order (ECO) flows for 40-nanometer systems on a chip (SoCs). Exar selected the Magma solution after an extensive evaluation in which Tekton and QCP were shown to efficiently perform multi-mode multi-corner analysis and extraction, to deliver 5X faster runtime than traditional tools, and to provide sign-off quality results. Exar is now leveraging the Magma solution to shorten development cycles and accelerate shipment of next-generation devices to customers to meet dynamic market requirements.

“Our migration to smaller process geometries (40 nm and below) requires an exceptional timing analysis platform that yields rapid and accurate results over an ever increasing number of timing scenarios,” said George Apostol, executive vice president of Engineering and Operations, and chief technical officer at Exar Corporation. “Enabling analysis of multiple timing modes simultaneously, Magma’s Tekton and QCP with a multi-threaded capability for full-chip extraction gives us world-class performance to greatly shorten our time to tape-out schedules.”

“Tekton and QCP were specifically architected for today’s multi-core processing hardware, enabling the tools to quickly and accurately analyze the increasing numbers of extraction corners and scenarios required for sign-off at 40 nm and below,” said Jacob Avidan, general manager of Magma’s Digital Sign-off Business Unit. “Exar’s due diligence in testing and subsequent deployment of Magma’s sign-off solution highlights its ability break the sign-off and ECO flow bottleneck.”

Tekton Multi-Mode Multi-Corner Analysis Speeds Turnaround Times and Reduces Costs

Performing multi-mode multi-corner or multi-scenario analysis is time consuming, expensive and cumbersome. Design teams are often forced to purchase many expensive servers and accompanying software licenses to parallelize the multi-scenario analysis in order to shorten run times. In some cases, design teams resort to using abstracted timing models to accelerate the analysis, but at the expense of accuracy. Tekton performs extremely fast, multi-scenario analysis on a single machine and provides the accuracy of existing sign-off solutions. Over a variety of designs with up to 50 scenarios and design sizes up to 30M instances, Tekton performed timing analysis, with OCV and crosstalk enabled, in less than one hour on a single machine.

QCP: Meeting the Extraction Challenges of Advanced-Node Design

QCP was architected to provide the fastest extraction with the highest accuracy. QCP provides near-linear scalability on multi-processor machines as well as highly efficient distributed processing to handle increasing design sizes and the exploding number of corner scenarios at 40 nm and below. It allows designers to process large numbers of corners in a single extraction run, with a minimal increase in runtime over single-corner extraction. With a combination of sign-off-quality extraction and the fastest runtimes in the marketplace, QCP offers both maximum efficiency in timing closure and confidence in design integrity.

About Magma

Leading semiconductor companies worldwide use Magma’s electronic design automation (EDA) software to produce chips for a wide variety of vertical markets including tablet computing, mobile devices, electronic games, digital video, networking, military/aerospace and memory. Silicon One, Magma’s technology solutions for emerging silicon, address time to market, product differentiation, cost and performance while making silicon more profitable. Magma products include software for digital design, analog implementation, mixed-signal design, physical verification, circuit simulation, characterization and yield management. The company maintains headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and offices throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Asia and India. Magma’s stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAVA. Follow Magma on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/MagmaEDA and on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/Magma. Visit Magma Design Automation on the Web at www.magma-da.com

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Magma is a registered trademark and QCP and Tekton are trademarks of Magma Design Automation Inc. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Forward-Looking Statements:

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters set forth in this press release, including statements that Tekton and QCP offers fast, accurate timing analysis and extraction, and other statements about the features and benefits of Magma products, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially including, but not limited to, Exar’s decision to continue using Magma’s software; both companies’ abilities to keep pace with rapidly changing technology; and their products’ abilities to produce desired results. Further discussion of these and other potential risk factors may be found in Magma's public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov). Magma undertakes no additional obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

Contacts:

Magma Design Automation Inc.

Monica Marmie

Director, Corporate Marketing

(408) 565-7689

mmarmie[at]magma-da[dot]com

Nicky Denovan

Magma Press Relations, Europe

EvokedSet

Tel: +44 7747 017654

Email: nicky[at]evokedset[dot]com

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