EDA News Sunday September 22, 2002 From: EDAToolsCafe _____ http://www.mentor.com/pads/ _____ About this issue Welcome to the first issue of EDA Weekly _____ September 13 - 19 - By Ann Steffora Read business product alliance news and analysis of weekly happenings _____ Overall, the significant news this week included interesting product announcements such as Synopsys, Inc.'s DesignWare BlueIQ Core, a complete solution enabling designers to quickly add Bluetooth capability to system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Synopsys said DesignWare BlueIQ offloads the host CPU of all real-time Bluetooth activity by providing an intelligent integrated subsystem that includes baseband controller hardware, as well as the link manager software running on an included industry-standard microcontroller. Targeted at high-volume consumer applications, the BlueIQ architecture optimally partitions the application and Bluetooth processing, leading to significantly reduced application cost and power. The DesignWare BlueIQ Core provides both VHDL and Verilog RTL source code for the baseband, as well as C-language source code for the link manager firmware that can reside in RAM, ROM, or Flash memory. A verification environment is also included for bus functional models and test suites. The BlueIQ Core connects to the host CPU via a standard UART interface and is compatible with any qualified Bluetooth high-level stack and application profiles. The BlueIQ Core is optimized to connect directly to the Silicon Wave SiW1701 radio modem and can be connected with other radio modems on request. A DesignWare Bluetooth Development Kit is also available, which consists of a silicon implementation of the BlueIQ Core, a Silicon Wave SiW1701 radio modem chip, and a demonstration version of Bluetooth software from Mezoe. Synopsys worked closely with two Bluetooth industry leaders Silicon Wave and Mezoe on this product. Cadence Design Systems, Inc. unveiled its Cadence Encounter RTL-to-GDSII architecture for nanometer-scale digital design implementation that combines silicon virtual prototyping and detailed IC implementation into a unified architecture with a single in-memory data model and user interface. Cadence said all SoC Encounter customers will be upgraded to version 2.2, which is based on the new architecture and nanometer technologies, including the NanoRoute graph-based routing engine and CeltIC signal integrity analyzer. Cadence also introduced Nano Encounter, a new lower-cost product configuration that supports non-hierarchical designs up to 10-million-gates. SoC Encounter and Nano Encounter support a continuous convergence methodology in which design teams get full-chip detailed design implementation - including detailed routing - the first day of implementation and every day thereafter. The Encounter system is the first design architecture with the performance and capacity to deliver daily full-chip, full-wire iterations for massive nanometer designs. This wires-first approach enables design teams to always know the status of their design relative to its performance goals, to always work on the highest priority portions of the design, and to make systematic, predictable progress toward tapeout. Monterey Design Systems reported that its IC Wizard hierarchical design planner enabled the Telecommunication Network Systems Group of Fujitsu Limited to achieve a 15 percent reduction in die size on a 3.3 million gate telecommunications chip, which contains 3.3 million logic gates, 313 RAM macros, more than 10 clock domains and was fabbed on a six-metal-layer, 0.18 çm process technology. Synchronicity, Inc. announced the Synchronicity Developer Suite version 3.3 with enhancements in the management of Cadence Custom IC (CIC) designs and support for Japanese-language design collaboration. This new version upgrades the Developer Suite, including its component tools ProjectSync and DesignSync, and its role specific variants - the HLD, SOC and Physical Developer Suites. The Physical Developer Suite, with the DesignSync DFII tool to manage Cadence design databases, contains new user interface features and customization capabilities, in order to give the user greater flexibility and reduce data management time. The Physical Developer Suite will also be compatible with the recent 5.0 release of the Cadence CIC software. Customers moving to the Cadence CIC 5.0 release will be able to continue using Synchronicity for design collaboration and management. Synchronicity support for Cadence CIC 5.0 is available to select customers now and will be universally available in October. Magma Design Automation, Inc. announced that Paxonet Communications has completed a 133 MHz, 0.13-micron optical networking IC using Blast Fusion and Blast Noise. Paxonet's "Chopper" device, which performs classification, policing and performance monitoring of packets / cells at rates of 2.5Gbps (OC-48), contains 2 million gates and 1.4Mbits of RAM. Paxonet said that the high capacity of Blast Fusion allowed it to implement the large design using a flat design methodology, and Linux systems helped achieve accelerated run times. Paxonet said it was able to take the design from netlist to GDSII in just 10 weeks, meeting all their design and schedule requirements, by using the Magma integrated approach. Magma also reported new senior management appointments to its executive staff. Saeid Ghafouri has been named senior vice president of field operations and Venktesh Shukla has been named senior vice president of marketing and business development. Both report to Roy E. Jewell, Magma president and chief operating officer. Most recently, Shukla was chief executive officer of Everypath, a leader in enterprise mobile computing. Prior to Everypath, Shukla was vice president of marketing at Ambit Design, where he was the key architect of its successful entry into the logic synthesis market. Prior to Ambit, Shukla spent four and a half years at Cadence as strategic marketing manager, director of marketing and eventually vice president of marketing. His years at Cadence were notable for his efforts in leading a turnaround in Verilog fortunes against the predominately favored VHDL. Shukla earned a master's degree in management from MIT's Sloan School of Management and bachelor's degree in electronics engineering in India. Prior to joining Magma, Ghafouri was president and CEO of Empact Software, where he managed the transformation of the company from a web-based electronics exchange business to a profitable enterprise software company. In 1998, he joined EDA company interHDL as president and CEO, successfully selling the company to Avant! that same year. Prior to that, Ghafouri joined Silicon Architects (the first commercial library provider) and was responsible for worldwide sales operations and, following its merger with Synopsys, became Synopsys' vice president of sales for all library products. He spent eight years with Cadence (ECAD at the time), first as an AE, then building the field AE organization, and finally was given responsibility to rebuild the factory support infrastructure, including corporate AEs, educational services and documentation. Ghafouri began his career as an IC designer for Data General. He has a bachelor's degree in electronics engineering. Synopsys Professional Services assisted ARC International with two strategic projects that enable ARC and its customers to integrate ARCtangent microprocessor cores more quickly and reliably into SoCs at 0.13-micron and below geometries. In addition, ARC has now joined other premier IP providers as a member of the Synopsys Professional Services Alliance Program. The Alliance Program offers developers of complex ICs a comprehensive set of design services leveraging design solutions from best-in-class technology vendors, enabling customers to gain access to complete product development solutions that shorten product development time. In the first project with ARC, an integration flow from RTL to Placed Gates was established, providing a faster and more predictable route for implementing designs utilizing ARC's configurable processor cores on various silicon technologies. In the second project, Synopsys design consultants helped develop a VERA and C-based verification environment for ARC's configurable processors and its peripherals. ARC uses this environment for internal validation of their cores, as well as by the company's customers to ensure correct integration of ARC IP into their SoC designs. Synopsys also announced the latest addition to its TetraMAX ATPG family, TetraMAX TenX, which provides distributed processing for automatic test pattern generation (ATPG). Distributing compute-intensive ATPG tasks across multiple CPUs, workstations and servers helps accelerate ATPG for the largest and most complex designs, thereby reducing manufacturing test development time and lowering the overall cost of test, the company said. Parthus Technologies Plc and 1st Silicon (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd. have announced a licensing agreement meant to enable SoC designers to access essential Parthus phase lock loop (PLL) IP from 1st Silicon as part of the company's foundry service. As the first phase of the agreement, 1st Silicon will verify the Parthus PLL IP in silicon using a test chip containing multiple PLL instantiations designed to exercise the extremes of the design range. Further verification will be completed through simulations using an automated test bench designed to test all valid PLL configurations in 1st Silicon's 0.25-and 0.18-micron CMOS process technologies. Alatek, Inc. introduced a new three million ASIC gate design emulator at $99,600 "Permanent License Purchase," which is a fraction of what other EDA vendors require for similar capacity and performance products, the company said. The product, COMULATOR 3M, is based on a new release of Alatek's proprietary hardware embedded simulation (HES) technology. COMULATOR-3M is a compact form-factor, which enables all hardware to reside with the HDL simulation workstation and can support a maximum capacity up to 15 Million ASIC gates. Alatek hardware features on-board clock speeds of 20-33 MHz. To best fulfill the customer needs, COMULATOR-3M is working under UNIX, LINUX and NT/XP operating systems, and may be transferred between platforms at any time. Alatek hardware is delivered on "off-the-shelf" SUN workstations, entry-level servers, and high performance PC platforms. The COMULATOR-3M emulator product fits within the main ASIC prototyping and FPGA design flows and uses customer's existing HDL simulation and synthesis tools. This minimizes costs, cuts learning curve and lowers the risk involved in bringing a new design verification technology. Popular HDL simulators such as Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor and Aldec are supported, via PLI and VHPI interfaces and this includes VHDL, Verilog and mixed language versions. Ansoft Corporation has refocused operations on its core software business and will discontinue its efforts to apply its IP technology core to hardware design through Altra Broadband's Irvine Technology Center. The Irvine Technology Center will close operations effective September 2002. Along with its plans to exit its hardware IP efforts, Ansoft has streamlined operations, resulting in a reduction of its workforce. These actions will reduce Ansoft's quarterly expenses by approximately $800,000, enabling the company to target a third fiscal quarter operating income revenue breakeven point of $12.4 million. Get2Chip Inc. expanded its website to include an educational section called "DesignZone," where designers of large ICs can download real-world design examples using various implementation paths. Designers will find design case studies from different application domains, including DSP, networking and wireless that detail how to design above the RTL. These designs have been modeled at the architectural abstraction level using the POCA (Pins-out Cycle-accurate) style of the Verilog HDL. They are automatically synthesized to technology gates using Get2Chip's Architectural Compiler, G2C-AC, which embeds production-proven Global Focused RTL Synthesis technology to achieve high-speed, high-performance synthesis of multi-million gate ICs. Designs currently posted in the DesignZone include Embedded Zero-Tree Wavelet Encoding (EZW), Ethernet MAC and Triple-Data Encryption (3DES). Designs were initially coded in C and validated, then converted into IO cycle accurate Verilog and validated against the same stimuli at the architectural level. Examples can be downloaded at no charge from the Get2Chip website located at: www.get2chip.com/docs/designzone/design_zone.asp . According to industry experts attending the Third International Symposium on 157nm Lithography, held in Antwerp, Belgium, all major obstacles to manufacturing 157nm optical lithography have been overcome, and the industry is planning for insertion of 157nm lithography at the 65nm node. General Chair of the 2002 157nm symposium, and vice president of Silicon Process and Device Technology at IMEC, Luc Van den hove said, that although very significant engineering challenges remain, it is believed that the developments are on track targeting insertion in manufacturing, and that all major showstoppers have been removed. Moreover, Tony Yen, Symposium co-chair and a director of Lithography at International SEMATECH (ISMT) said, "All lens designs for the first-generation 157nm exposure tools have now been fixed, and suppliers' commitment to deliver the first 157nm scanners in 2004 is highly encouraging." The meeting was held September 3 through 6, and was organized by IMEC and International SEMATECH in cooperation with SELETE, the Japanese chip consortium. Nearly 240 representatives from worldwide chipmakers, tool and materials suppliers, consortia, universities, laboratories, and research groups attended the symposium. To read more news, click here. --Ann Steffora, Managing Editor, EDAToolsCafİ You are subscribed as: [dolinsky@gsu.by]. Cafe News is a service for EDA professionals. EDAToolsCafe respects your online time and Internet privacy. If you would prefer not to receive this type of email or if you consider this message as unsolicited commercial e-mail, please click here . PLEASE NOTE: You can change the frequency of this newsletter by clicking here . If you have questions about EDAToolsCafe services, please send email to edaadmin@ibsystems.com . Copyright c 2002. Internet Business Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.