Home

Physical Design

Magma Unveils Tekton Its Static Timing Analysis Solution

Wed, 2010-03-10 07:51 — Gabe Moretti

Magma Design Automation Inc. unveiled Tekton, a new static timing analysis (STA) platform that offers significantly higher capacity and dramatically faster runtimes than traditional STA tools, without sacrificing accuracy. Unlike other solutions, Tekton runs multi-scenario analysis on low-cost hardware without requiring a large number of expensive servers and software licenses. Leveraging breakthrough technology, this revolutionary new platform addresses complex sign-off challenges and is suited for today's most challenging designs. Its next generation architecture offers the speed, capacity, and accuracy required for the industry's toughest designs. According to Rajeev Madhavan, Chairman and CEO, who announced the new product during the Magma Users Group meeting in San Jose, the new product has been engineered from scratch to meet the challenges of execution speed and accuracy presented by today's designs.

Silicon Frontline Technology Improves Performance of its Products

Mon, 2010-02-22 18:05 — Gabe Moretti

Silicon Frontline Technology, Inc. announced that new versions of its flagship post-layout verification products, F3D (Fast 3D) for fast 3D extraction and R3D (Resistive 3D) for 3D extraction and analysis of large resistive structures like power devices, are shipping now. F3D improves its performance by up to 10x when compared to the previous version. F3D and R3D also accommodate larger designs than the previous versions announced in May 2009.

Designers can choose F3D for providing nanometer and Analog Mixed Signal (A/MS) design accuracy and R3D for its ability to improve the reliability and efficiency of semiconductor power devices.

Springsoft Releases OA-Compliant Custom IC Solution

Mon, 2010-02-22 08:48 — Gabe Moretti

SpringSoft, Inc. announced the availability of its latest version of the Laker Custom Layout Automation System, which, the company claims, offers the industry's most complete and robust support of the OpenAccess (OA) database industry standard. The release builds on several years of collaboration by SpringSoft with others in the industry to develop the infrastructure and technology required to deliver on the promise of the OA effort.

The latest release of the Laker system is completely compatible with the OA database and API, which can be used as the center of a multi-vendor interoperable IC design environment. Laker now supports all the necessary interfaces, libraries and design kits -- including interoperable process design kits (iPDKs) from TSMC -- to work within a heterogeneous tools environment. It also works with other custom IC tools, such as Cadence's Virtuoso.

Cadence Encounter 9.1 Addresses Industry Productivity Crisis

Tue, 2010-02-02 10:39 — Gabe Moretti

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. has released Encounter Digital Implementation (EDI) System 9.1, a complete and integrated digital design, implementation, and verification environment for the development of large-scale, complex SoCs. The new and expanded suite of capabilities in EDI System 9.1 aims to answer the industry call for improved designer productivity in developing advanced low power SoCs at leading-edge process nodes -- such as 32- and 28-nanometer -- with hundreds of millions of gates, including hundreds of IP elements and embedded processors.

Go Meet the Leading Edge at EDPS

Fri, 2010-01-29 13:29 — Gabe Moretti

Every April the leading edge of the leading edge of Electronic Design Automation meets in Monterey to address design problems that are making design more difficult than it should be. The meeting is called the Electronic Design Process Symposium of EDPS.

The format favors open discussions around presented papers. It only lasts two full days, but they are days filled with work and ideas. It is a sound mix of academic and industrial research and experiences that tend to look at the near future of electronic design. The goal is to foresee what the coming design problems might be and propose either solutions or alternatives.

Sigrity Introduces Electrical and Thermal Co-Simulation Tool

Fri, 2010-01-29 12:40 — Gabe Moretti

Sigrity, Inc., announced PowerDC Thermal – new software that works in concert with the company’s popular PowerDC Electrical simulation software to create what it believes to be the industry’s first and only integrated thermal / electrical analysis environment for IC packages and printed circuit boards. Sigrity’s has stated that PowerDC Thermal product eliminates manual iterations between simulations with separate electrical and thermal tools, reduces time, and improves results convergence. It is ideal for avoiding field failures.

PrimeTime 2009.12 Delivers New Threaded Multicore Performance

Mon, 2010-01-11 09:38 — Gabe Moretti

Synopsys, Inc. announced the immediate availability of PrimeTime 2009.12, which it claims delivers up to 2X speed up of timing signoff through the addition of threaded multicore processing. With this latest addition, Synopsys' PrimeTime tool enables design teams to achieve optimal runtime performance across their heterogeneous multicore compute environments by utilizing distributed and threaded multicore processing in tandem.

ATopTech Appoints Jue-Hsien Chern as CEO

Mon, 2010-01-11 09:12 — Gabe Moretti

ATopTech, Inc. has appointed Jue-Hsien Chern as CEO. ATopTech also achieved profitability based on record sales from new customer adoption of Aprisa, the complete netlist to GDSII physical design solution, as well as renewals within existing accounts.

TowerJazz and Tanner EDA Announce Process Design Kit Collaboration

Fri, 2009-11-20 09:03 — Gabe Moretti

TowerJazz, and Tanner EDA announced a joint initiative to develop Process Design Kits (PDKs) for analog/mixed-signal (A/MS) designers using Tanner EDA’s HiPer Silicon software. This collaboration gives Tanner EDA customers access to TowerJazz’s 0.18- and 0.35-micron power management process platform and TowerJazz customers access to Tanner EDA’s A/MS tools.

Magma Announces BoardView

Tue, 2009-11-17 15:40 — Gabe Moretti

Magma Design Automation announced BoardView, a new software that extends CAD navigation and circuit debug from integrated circuits (ICs) to printed circuit boards (PCBs) and multichip modules (MCMs). BoardView is the only commercially available tool to integrate IC and PCB circuit debug with online signal trace and CAD navigation. With BoardView, fab teams can rapidly trace signals on the PCB from chips to board and back again and then quickly navigate failure analysis tools to X, Y locations to determine the cause of the fault.