July 12, 2011 -- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. today announced it has acquired Azuro, Inc.. Azuro offers clock-concurrent optimization technology, also known as ccopt, which delivers capabilities for designers faced with increasing performance, power and area challenges.

Specifically, ccopt technology has delivered significant quality of silicon (QoS) on high-speed processor designs in the areas of:

Power (clock tree power reduction up to 30% and total power improvements of up to 10%). Performance (improvements of up to 100MHz for a GHz design). Area (clock tree area reduction up to 30%).

The acquisition was completed July 11, 2011, and is not expected to have a material effect on the Cadence's results of operation for fiscal 2011. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. All key management, technical and key field applications personnel will transition to Cadence.

The Azuro ccopt technology is experiencing rapid adoption by designers implementing high-speed embedded processors and complex SOCs. The technology uniquely integrates and merges core steps in the flow including timing-driven placement, useful-skew clock tree synthesis, incremental physical optimization, physical clock gating, and post-clock tree optimization.

"Azuro has invented a truly disruptive technology that goes far beyond traditional, multi-step and iterative digital implementation flows and provides significant advantages for both today's complex silicon and SOC designs, as well as advanced-node, next-generation SOCs," said Chi-Ping Hsu, Senior Vice President, R&D, Silicon Realization Group at Cadence.

"Realizing the growing challenges of increasingly complex SOCs, Azuro pioneered a fundamentally new approach to digital implementation that took into account the critical role of clocks in achieving power, performance, and area specs," said Paul Cunningham, co-founder and CEO of Azuro. "Cadence has been aggressively advancing its digital implementation solution and shares our view of the innovation that is required to continue to help realize the next generation of design."