Leading Universities Adopt Prolific for Educational and Research Programs
NEWARK, Calif. -- May 8, 2002 -- Prolific, the leading provider of automated standard cell creation software, today announced the formation of the Prolific Research and Education Program. The program enables students to learn how to design standard cells using the same products that worldwide semiconductor companies use in their production standard cell design flows.
"We are very committed to the academic community," said Dan Nenni, vice president of sales and marketing at Prolific. "We believe the top designers of tomorrow will come from those Universities with best-in-class tools in their classrooms. Our overall goal is to improve the way standard cells are developed and deployed, both by automation and integration into the mainstream EDA flow, and we believe educational institutions are important allies."
Charter members of the Prolific Education and Research Program include such prestigious institutions as University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; University of Michigan; Tokyo University; and University of Mannheim, Germany.
"Students enrolled in our VLSI design courses need to use the tools they will be using to design tomorrow's electronic products," said Dr. Wayne Dai, professor of Computer Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. "We are extremely grateful to Prolific for providing ProGenesis™, giving our students access to powerful features such as synthesis, generation and compaction, all in a single design tool."
"With Prolific tools, my students have the ability to experiment with an industrial-grade environment, preparing them for what I believe is the next wave in SOC design technology," said Dr. Don Bouldin, University of Tennessee Knoxville.
"The program provides a great opportunity for the academic community," said Prof. Richard B. Brown, interim chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. "Having access to Prolific's tools has enabled our students to develop new design flows which we believe will help close the performance and power gap between synthesized and custom circuits.'
"With the Prolific toolsuite our students experience the advantages of the two major ASIC design methodology worlds, cell-based and full-custom design. Only working with leading edge design automation tools like Prolifics ProGenesis enable our students to compete with other engineers worldwide. Prolifics technologie could lead to a new design flow by integrating the benefits of a language abstraction in full custom design." said Prof. Dr. Ulrich Bruening, Dep. of Computer Engineering at the University of Mannheim.
About Prolific
Founded in 1995, Prolific Inc. develops the leading software for automatically creating standard cells without giving up custom design styles. Prolific's ProGenesis™ suite allows designers to quickly and accurately create optimized standard-cell libraries using design-specific information contained in a SPICE netlist, process-specific information defined in design rules, and designer-specific options specified in the cell template. The Prolific ProLiquid™ approach integrates the creation of standard cell libraries into the mainstream EDA flow, enabling design-specific standard cells to be created on the fly during the synthesis and place-and-route phase of the EDA design flow. Prolific is headquartered in Newark, Calif., at 39899 Balentine Dr., Suite 380, Newark, CA 94560, telephone 510/252-0490, fax 510/252-0491. For more information, visit www.prolificinc.com.
