C-Cube Extends Usage of Avant! Tools
Company Purchases Hercules and Star-RC - Avant!'s Verification and
Extraction Tools
FREMONT, Calif., April 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Avant! Corporation (Nasdaq: AVNT - news) today
announced that C-Cube Microsystems (Nasdaq: CUBE - news) has extended the usage of Avant!
integrated circuit design automation (ICDA) solutions and entered into an agreement to purchase
Avant!'s Hercules(TM) and Star-RC(TM) tools. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Hercules and Star-RC are hierarchical physical design verification and full-chip extraction tools.
C-Cube's engineers performed extensive benchmarks before selecting both tools for their advanced
ASIC designs.
''C-Cube's purchase order confirms our strong competitive advantage in the marketplace for IC
design solutions,'' stated Vic Kulkarni, head of Product Marketing for Avant!. ''C-Cube is currently
designing very large complex ICs which demand tough design requirements. Star-RC is the only
commercial solution that can handle such large design complexity while providing an accurate
(calibrated to silicon) and compact RC-parasitic database. We are pleased C-Cube has recognized
Avant!'s Star-RC and Hercules for technical superiority and the dramatic improvement in designers'
productivity, allowing for unlimited growth in designing larger ICs in the future.''
''C-Cube conducted an open evaluation process by inviting all EDA vendors,'' said Man-Mohan
Mittal, director of VLSI Design Automation for C-Cube. ''The objective of our benchmark was to
evaluate which EDA vendor could provide C-Cube with the best extraction and verification tools for
large and complex hierarchical designs. Hercules and Star-RC demonstrated significant accuracy and
performance improvements over their competitors. The products will greatly shorten our design cycle
and improve the quality of our design.''
Benchmark results included these high performance results:
* The benchmark design was based on a 5.3 million transistor semiconductor
chip, the largest that C-Cube has designed.
* Design Rule Conversion (DRC) was done directly from Dracula compatible
files, enabling a smooth transition for C-Cube.
* DRC and LVS results were markedly faster than competitors' products.
''We are pleased that Hercules and Star-RC outperformed the competition in runtime and
accuracy,'' said John Studders, head of Avant!'s Verification Product Division. ''Hercules' Explorer
interface is compatible with Opus which was particularly valuable to C-Cube. C-Cube creates key
enabling technologies for the information age. We're looking forward to working with C-Cube to
help the company achieve its strategic imperative of becoming number one in the Digital Video and
ASIC marketplace,'' Studders added.
More about Hercules
Hercules version 1997.4 is the industry's only production-proven hierarchical physical verification
system that addresses the special challenges of very-deep-submicron (VDSM) integrated circuit
design. Proven on thousands of production designs since its introduction, Hercules continues its
technical leadership with the recent successful benchmarks on a variety of complex designs, including
256 Mb DRAM, 26-million transistor SRAM, 40-million transistor ASIC, as well as 100-million
transistor microprocessor. The production-proven verification technology available in Hercules is
capable of verifying hundreds of millions of devices. It has features that other competitor's tools like
Calibre from Mentor Graphics or Vampire from Cadence cannot offer.
The latest version of Hercules yields results that are up to 18 times faster than Cadence's Dracula,
and approximately 6 times faster than Mentor's Calibre. In addition, Hercules integrates into a user
layout environment through a fully integrated graphical debug environment. Mentor's Calibre doesn't
offer this feature.
Hercules provides extensive foundry support for deep-submicron process technologies and design
rules. Version 1997.4 is completely integrated within Avant!'s Milkyway(TM), launched in October
1997 as the EDA industry's first common database for handling complex designs in VDSM
technology.
More about Star-RC
Star-RC version 1997.4 is the industry's leading full-chip 3-D extraction tool. It's rich set of features,
production proven accuracy, and lean memory and CPU usage are key enablers that have made it
the tool of choice for ASIC, ASSP, memory, and microprocessor designers. Star-RC has been used
to extract full-chip parasitics for 256 Mb DRAM, 10 million transistor gate array, and million gate
ASIC. Star-RC also leverages Avant!'s TCAD Business Unit technology. It combines the leading
process modeling TCAD flow with extensive foundry support and offers designers both an
easy-to-use tool and the most accurate solution.
Through Avant!'s Silicon Blueprint program, users are afforded calibrated-to-silicon models for
Star-RC from leading foundries. Star-RC is tightly integrated with Avant! place and route and third
party place and route software. At all times during the design cycle, even before layout is finalized,
Star-RC provides complete DSPF and SDF back-annotation in these flows.
Star-RC's efficient distributed processing allows today's largest designs to be extracted in hours,
enabling multiple iterations in a single day. In addition, Star-RC's support for macro and IP-reuse
significantly decreases turn-around time during tape-out, as parasitic models for imported blocks, or
blocks that have not changed and are re-used. Star-RC provides built-in static noise analysis, delay
calculation, process modeling with 3-D field solver, RC reduction, distributed processing, hierarchical
and flat extraction, critical path identification and sensitization. It is tightly integrated with Avant!'s
Milkway database, Apollo, Hercules, Star-Power, Star-SIM, Star-HSPICE, and Star-Time.
Additionally, it is compatible with LEF/DEF, SPICE, DSPF and SDF formats.
About Avant!
Avant! (pronounced ah VANH tee) Corporation develops, markets, and supports integrated circuit
design automation (ICDA) software for the simulation, layout, verification and analysis of deep
submicron ICs including microprocessors, microcontrollers, application-specific standard products
(ASSPs) and complex application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The company is
headquartered in Fremont, California with offices located worldwide.
Tel: 510-413-8000, Fax: 510-413-8080. www.avanticorp.com
NOTE: Avant!, Apollo, Hercules and Star-Time are trademarks of Avant! Corporation. TMA is a
trademark of Technology Modeling Associates, Inc. All other company and product names
mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners and should be
treated as such.
SOURCE: Avant! Corporation |
