Magma Design, provider of the Blast Fusion IC physical design system, is in the middle of a painful transition. The company has received around $90 million in venture capital funding — probably the largest amount that's ever gone into an EDA vendor, Jewell said. "Part of my charter was to take a company that had been very heavily funded on the venture side, and position it to be publicly sustainable in the future," he said.

Jewell also confirmed that Magma is moving closer to an initial public offering, although he declined to cite a time frame. "I would say that in the near future, we're looking at how to position this company to go out," he said. "We're pretty far down that path."

The cuts, which apparently began after Jewell took the COO position March 10, leave Magma with just under 200 workers. Though Jewell wouldn't say how many workers had lost their jobs, he said that industry reports of 25 percent layoffs were "a little high but not far off."

Jewell said that Magma's original funding followed a "dot-com model, where you spend and grow top line at the expense of short-term profitability. What we've tried to do is make the company much more responsible from a shareholder point of view and get profitable in a shorter period of time."

Jewell said the cuts were made "across the board" and included reductions in Magma's U.S. sales force and support staff. R&D was "least affected," he said. The executive acknowledged that Magma is "de-emphasizing" the analysis products it acquired from Moscape Inc. to focus more clearly on its flagship product, Blast Fusion.

Jewell adamantly denied that the cuts were related to disappointing sales or revenues. He said Magma enjoys a very strong backlog, and expects to be "very strongly profitable" by the fourth calendar quarter of 2001. He declined to reveal revenue figures for the company.

"We're doing what other companies in the Silicon Valley are doing — focusing on the biggest return for the effort and not trying to be everything to everybody," he said.