Magma, IIT Madras announce partnership

'The course that incorporate the Magma tools has recieved overwhelming
response from students'

Magma Design Automation India, a wholly owned subsidi-ary of Magma Design
Auto-mation Inc, USA, provider of semiconductor design soft-ware, has announced
its succ-essful partnership with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras,
to substantially incre-ase talent trained and exposed to next-generation EDA
(elect-ronic design automation) tools.

According to the press release, the partnership, which began a year ago when
Mag-ma provided IIT-Madras with licenses of its next-generation EDA tools, has
received over-whelming response with over 125 students enrolling for the
CAD4VLSI course that incorpor-ates the Magma tools. IIT-Madras was the first
institute to partner as part of Magma's "India IC Excellence"
initiative to create an "IC design ecosys-tem" to address the manpower
challenges faced by the Indian semiconductor industry.

Professor S Srinivasan, Head of the Electrical Engineer-ing Department at IIT-Madras
said, "Magma's next-genera-tion EDA toolset, with its cutt-ing-edge
design philosophy and integrated design flow, add-resses both the teaching and
research aspects of our insti-tute, leading us to successfully integrate the
Magma IC soft-ware design flow into our VLSI curriculum."

Professor V Kamakoti of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at
IIT Madras said, "By going beyond just providing licenses and actively
supporting adoption and integration of the Magma design tools into our program,
Magma India management and its Univer-sity Support team have taken the hitherto
routine acade-mia-industry interaction to an altogether new level. This tight
integration of the tools into the curriculum takes the students through a
complete RTL to GDS-II design cycle on a multimillion-gate design and has
resulted in the program being extremely successful. We intend to build on this
momentum and explore an extension of this partnership."

Anand Anandkumar, PhD, MD of Magma Design Auto-mation India said, "The
signi-ficance of this partnership and the impact of its success on the local IC
design industry can be understood consider-ing that fewer than 2,000 students
graduate in VLSI design across India annually."

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