Mountain View, California-based Synopsys Inc has signed a definitive agreement to acquire fellow integrated circuit design automation tools company Epic Design Technology Inc, which lives down the road in Sunnyvale. Synopsys concentrates on high-level design automation, while Epic’s specialty is deep submicron analysis, verification and reliability tools, and there is no overlap between the toolsets, say the two. Synopsys says its customers have continuously asked it to provide methodology and products reaching from high level de-sign down to deep submicron silicon. Epic’s tools will be extended to include design reuse features from Synopsys, key for system-on-a-chip work. Synopsys will issue 0.7485 of a share of its common stock for each outstanding Epic share, and the merger will be accounted for as a pooling of interest transaction. Epic will become a Synopsys business unit. Synopsys re-ported revenues of $353.5m in fiscal 1996, and has 1,200 employees, while Epic, with 200 employees, made $44m revenue last year.
