After being acquired for $260 million in 2000, the team that founded Micro Magic has restarted the company and has revised its suite of tools for designing fast, low-power SoCs. Following a two-year "stealth-mode" period during which the company’s tools were updated and enhanced, the new versions have been deemed road-worthy through a quiet beta release.

The redesigned and enhanced suite of Micro Magic tools includes:

-- MAX, a full-featured layout editor that provides real-time design rule checking (DRC), schematic-driven layout, and interactive cross probing between layout and schematic. In a recent test on a 4-Gbyte GDSII file, MAX was able to redisplay the entire chip with all layers visible in less than one second.

-- SUE, a design environment and schematic capture tool that controls the entire design flow, including third-party point tools, as well as providing schematic entry. SUE can also drive Spice and Verilog simulators.

-- DPC (Datapath Compiler), a specialized tool for optimizing high-speed datapaths. Designs optimized by DPC are typically three times faster and 40% smaller than the same design implemented with standard ASIC flows, it’s claimed.

-- MCC (Megacell Compiler), a specialized tool for designing memories such as SRAMs, DRAMs, ROMs, CAMs, pad rings, or any other regular or semi-regular structure. MCC generates these designs in minutes and can help verify them as well.

In the interest of supporting open standards and interoperability, all of the company's tools feature a tool command language (TCL) interface and application programming interface (API). All databases are ASCII-based and are freely accessible by the user.

The entire suite of redesigned Micro Magic products is available immediately. Prices start at $30,000 per tool for an annual license. The software operates on the Linux platform.