Siemens expands industry-leading IC verification portfolio with acquisition of Fractal Technologies

• Acquisition adds production signoff-quality IP validation to help customers improve quality of silicon and shorten time-to-market
• Fractal’s technology to be integrated into Siemens’ Solido product family; extends Siemens’ machine learning-powered EDA functionality to the IP validation domain

Siemens Digital Industries Software today announced that it has acquired Fractal Technologies, a provider of production signoff-quality IP validation solutions, based in the U.S. and the Netherlands. With this acquisition, Siemens’ electronic design automation (EDA) customers can more quickly and easily validate internal and external IP and libraries used in their integrated circuit (IC) designs to improve overall quality and speed time-to-market.

Fractal’s offerings include a comprehensive suite of IP validation and comparison checks used by top-tier foundries, IP providers, integrated device manufacturers and fabless semiconductor companies to accelerate time-to-tapeout and improve silicon results by enabling design data quality and integrity.

“Today’s semiconductor design teams are seeking every possible advantage to deliver advanced, high-quality SoCs to market as rapidly as possible,” said Ravi Subramanian, Ph.D., senior vice president, IC Verification, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Our acquisition of Fractal Technologies, combined with the Solido product family, provides customers a tremendous advantage with a comprehensive IP validation solution that can speed design schedules, improve power, performance, and area (PPA) and identify sources of silicon failure before design tapeout.”

Siemens plans to add Fractal’s technology to the Xcelerator™ portfolio as part of its industry-leading suite of EDA IC verification offerings. Fractal’s products will join the Solido™ software product family, including the Solido Characterization Suite, which remains the industry standard for machine learning acceleration of IP validation and characterization. The machine learning technology within Solido enables variation-aware design and library validation for IP, from mature technologies to the most advanced, leading-edge process nodes.

“Semiconductor IP such as standard cells, memories, I/Os, and other specialized custom IP are the critical foundation upon which the world’s chips are built,” said Rene Donkers, chief executive officer for Fractal Technologies. “Being part of Siemens allows us to accelerate our R&D efforts, support a growing customer base, and further our vision to help enhance design closure predictability and turnaround time.”

Siemens’ acquisition of Fractal Technologies closed in May 2021. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.