Synopsys Acquires Ciranova

Consolidation continues in the EDA industry with Synopsys announcing today that they acquired Ciranova, a provider of software to automate custom IC layout. Remember that Synopsys invested in Ciranova back in March 2008 and September 2010 (along with Intel Capital, Mentor Graphics and Alloy Ventures), so this deal has some history to it. Ciranova touts Agile Layout:

Ciranova’s claim to fame is a toolset called Helix that allows a circuit designer to quickly get custom and analog IC layout without having to be an IC layout expert, taking minutes to hours of time compared to days and weeks:

Both Synopsys and Ciranova are founding members of the IPL Alliance and from a technology viewpoint use OpenAccess and PyCells to compete with dominant vendor Cadence and their SKILL-based Pcells.

This acquisition certainly validates the superior technology provided by Ciranova however it creates a challenge for Synopsys in how to integrate all this IC layout technology into a coherent set of tools:

[TABLE] style=”width: 700px”
|-
| Technology
| Synopsys
| Ciranova
| Magma
|-
| Schematic Capture
| Custom Designer SE
| Pyros Viewer
| Schematic Editor,
Titan Analog Virtual Prototyper
|-
| IC Layout
| Custom Designer LE
| Helix
| Layout Editor
|-
| Schematic Driven Layout
| Custom Designer SDL
| Helix
| Schematic Driven Layout
|-
| Design Rule Driven
| SmartDRD
| Helix
|
|-
| Routing
| Custom Designer LE
|
| Titan Shape Based Router
|-
| Analog IP
|
| PyCell
| Titan FlexCell
|-
| Circuit Optimization
|
|
| Titan Analog Design Accelerator
|-
| Cell Migration
|
| Helix
| Titan Analog Layout Accelerator
|-
| LDE Optimization
|
| Helix LDE Opt
|
|-
| Database
| OpenAccess
| OpenAccess
| OpenAccess
|-
| Pcells
| Python, C++
| Python
| Python
|-
| Scripting
| TCL
| Python
| TCL
|-
| iPDK support
| Yes
| Yes
| Yes
|-

I’d guess that we’ll see a Synopsys IC layout product roadmap by DAC 2013 or hopefully sooner. Short term the company line is, “All EDA tools live, keep working with the tools you have.”

Winners
Synopsys and Ciranova customers of course, now the smaller EDA company is part of the number one EDA vendor so the Ciranova technology will be around for years to come.

Losers
Mentor Graphics and Cadence Design. Mentor had some equity and could’ve been another good suitor for Ciranova. Cadence is still the dominant IC layout tool vendor with many competitors keeping them sharp and responsive.

Let’s see how many of the folks at Ciranova get to stay employed, because the Magma acquisition saw about half that company laid off because of product and organization overlap.