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Synopsys to buy rival Magma for $507 million

Chip design software maker Synopsys announced today it has agreed to acquire rival Magma Design Innovations for $507 million in cash.

Synopsys will pay $7.35 a share for San Jose, Calif-based Magma, a 28 percent premium over its closing price Wednesday of $5.72.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Synopsys was founded in 1986 and competes with Cadence Design Systems and Mentor Graphics in the sector of making software to help designers create and verify complex integrated circuits.

"The dramatic rise in complexity of today's semiconductor designs for all process nodes requires an equally dramatic increase in designer … Read more

Plizy offers a Pandora-like service for videos

Plizy is a new video recommendation app and service that uses a social algorithm to find videos you'll like. It mines what you and your friends do on social networks and yields, CEO Jonathan Benassaya says, near-perfect personalized playlists delivered directly to users on the Plizy iPad app. The app launched last week.

Think of Plizy as Pandora for videos, Benassaya says.

Plizy uses public APIs from DailyMotion, YouTube, and Vimeo to display ad-supported videos from those sites. Plizy also has an exclusive deal with Revision 3, from which it gets a better revenue split. Benassaya also wants to … Read more

Journey planned to the center of the Earth

File this one away under the rubric of "thinking big."

A half century after scientists failed on their first attempt to penetrate the Earth's mantle, geologists Damon Teagle of the National Oceanography Center in Southampton, England, and Benoit Ildefonse from Montpellier University in France say it's time for a second try. And unlike their predecessors, they have the technology to turn that challenging endeavor into a reality.

The goal is to retrieve samples from the Earth's mantle, a feat which, if successful, would supply a trove of new information about our planet's origins and … Read more