Cadence seems to be implementing its "must have" list in alphabetical order. So after Altos it was Azuro's turn. Will a B company be next? Most people in our industry will agree that clock and power optimizations are important, but what I did not know was that Cadence was doing a poor job at it. And so the company found that some key customers were going to Azuro to purchase what they could not get from Cadence. The solution was obvious: purchase the annoying interloper before a real competitor would.

According to the official Cadence press release Azuro offers unique clock concurrent optimization technology, also known as ccopt, which delivers superior 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 percent and total power improvements of up to 10 percent),
- Performance (improvements of up to 100 MHz for a GHz design), and
- Area (clock tree area reduction up to 30 percent).

It is clear that Cadence has strengthened its technical position in the Silicon Realization market segment with this acquisition. It is only natural to conclude that the improvements listed above were measured against the Encounter Digital Implementation (EDI) flow. The Azuro products will integrate very easily into the existing Cadence offering and they are specific enough to allow the existing Azuro technical team to remain focused on the products and not be dispersed within other Cadence technology centers.

Cadence has also announced that 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.. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. To me that means" it was quite affordable". One must take into consideration the additional income from licenses of Rubix and PowerCentric that Cadence will now realize as an offset to the cash payout Azuro investors and employees received. Cadence will offer the Azuro ccopt technology immediately as an upgrade add-on for Cadence EDI customers.