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synopsys

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

Novel writing helper

yWriter4 provides novelists with a tool to not only create their new story, but keep it tightly organized. This no-frills layout and inventive categorization may help bring that story from daydreams to the page.

The program's cluttered interface, full of buttons with no onscreen direction, practically begged us to visit the Help file. Luckily, while there, we discovered a wizard that walked us through the process and made everything much less confusing. The program required us to do a lot of prep work before we even wrote a word. However, we quickly learned that setting up databases of characters, … Read more