Investors participating in this financing include Austin Ventures, CMEA Ventures, Formative Ventures and KT Venture Group.

"Over the last year we have seen a steady increase in sales activity from key semiconductor suppliers that are aggressively moving to advanced process technologies," said Brian Connors, general partner of Formative Ventures. "Pyxis Technology's new strategic shift into the custom design arena provides an outstanding opportunity to capitalize on their proven world-class technology while expanding upon their sales momentum."

"The next great battleground in EDA is the custom design arena," said Jim Solomon, Pyxis board member and founder of Cadence Design Systems. "Pyxis NexusRoute-HPC is an OpenAccess-based plug-and-play routing technology that, when coupled with today's leading physical layout editors and placement technology, enables groundbreaking custom design flow productivity."

NexusRoute-HPC is integrated with SpringSoft's Laker Layout System to help joint customers create better layout with less effort.

In an earlier viewpoint Pixus president Phil Bishop recounted how the recent cooperation between Pyxis and SpringSoft has led to success. The SpringSoft and Pyxis collaboration enables designs to "be closed within the very finest of design timing scenarios and parameters...The tight integration made possible by the collaboration allows the simultaneous execution all functionality of two commercial tools in the same process. Integration does not have to be sacrificed to use powerful point tool technology."

NexusRoute-HPC reduces design time from weeks to hours by providing highly automated hierarchical custom routing and an integrated "what-if" analysis capability. Pyxis claims NexusRoute-SOC is a next-generation SoC digital routing technology optimized for advanced technologies 45nm and below.