Cadence to Acquire Rocketick to speed-up chip design simulations

11 April, 2016

Rocketick invented a parallel technology that speed-up the simulation times of new chips designs. Sources evaluated it as a $50 million deal

Rocketick invented a parallel technology that speed-up the simulation times of new chips designs. Sources evaluated it as a $50 million deal

CADENCE

Cadence Design Systems today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rocketick Technologies, an Israel based pioneer and leading provider of multicore parallel simulation. Industrial sources in Israel estimated that Cadence agreed to pay approximately $50 million. Rocketick’s technology accelerates Cadence Incisive Enterprise Simulator to provide up to 6X speed-up for register-transfer-level (RTL), up to 10X speed-up for gate-level functional and up to 30X speed-up for gate-level DFT simulations using standard x86-based servers.

The Rocketick solution is proven and is in use today by numerous marquee systems and semiconductor companies in the mobile, server, and graphics domains. “Ensuring that SoC verification is completed on time within ever shrinking project schedules is driving the strong need to speed up the underlying logic simulation technology,” said Anirudh Devgan, senior vice president and general manager of the System & Verification Group and the Digital & Signoff Group at Cadence.

“Rocketick is the leading, established provider of parallel simulation technology. I look forward to welcoming the Rocketick team to Cadence as we accelerate our innovation in functional verification to solve our customers’ most difficult challenges.”

Rocketick’s market-leading technology achieves linear speed-up by parallelizing simulation on standard x86-based multicore servers, providing automated partitioning across designs and testbenches, and the flexibility to direct simulations to server farm resources ranging from one to 64 cores. It also provides a significant accuracy advantage and enhanced visibility with four-state logic simulation, and reduces host memory footprint by 2-3X for gate-level designs. Rocketick’s technology works seamlessly with the Cadence Incisive Enterprise Simulator.

“Rocketick and Cadence serve market-leading customers whose verification challenges are testing the limits of conventional simulators” said Tomer Ben-David, CEO of Rocketick. “We are very excited to join the Cadence team and look forward to providing even more benefit to customers through the tight integration of Rocketick’s core engines with Cadence’s overall verification solution.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal 2016, and is not expected to have a material impact on Cadence’s fiscal 2016 results of operations. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Rocketick is backed by investments from Intel Capital and other strategic and financial investors. Needham & Company advised Rocketick on the transaction.

The first investor: Peregrine

Lior Shahory, General Partner at Peregrine Ventures and CEO of Incentive Incubator, who accompanied Rocketick from the day it was established, noted: “When we invested in Rocketick, most of Israel’s venture capital funds did not want to take the risk involved in investing in the chip sector. Moreover, Rocketick aspired to provide a complex product with huge technological challenge. One of the factors, which led us to this investment, was the quality of the entrepreneurs, three modest but impressive chip professionals. Another factor which contributed to the investment was the support from Israel’s Technological Incubators Program, which provides additional evidence to the key contribution of this program to the growth and development of Israel’s technology industry.”

Peregrine Ventures (http://www.peregrinevc.com/) is an Israeli venture capital fund, which specializes in investing in early stage high-tech companies, which it continues to accompany to advanced stages. The current deal is Peregrine’s second exit in the last 12 months, following the sale of Marketyze to Revionics several months ago. Peregrine exits also include Neovasc, Bballoon  and Eurekify.

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Posted in: Business , Featured Stories , News , Semiconductors

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