San jose, Calif., March 22, 2011 —Pulsic, the premier provider of physical design tools for custom design automation, today announced that STARC, the Japanese electronic design consortium co-founded by major Japanese semiconductor companies, has selected Pulsic’s new analog routing solution as its next generation router for the STARC-CAD AMS Analog/Mixed Signal reference flow. The new solution forms part of the Pulsic UniRouteTM technology bundle, which harnesses various shape-based routing solutions for custom, analog and mixed-signal markets, and supports the most complex design rule sets and advanced node technologies.
“After extensive validation, we found that Pulsic’s new analog routing technology is the only automatic routing tool that can handle this difficult task of our next generation Analog/Mixed-Signal Routing for STARC Motif,” said Kunihiko Tsuboi, senior manager of STARC’s mixed-signal design group. “The resultant routing patterns are what a layout designer would create manually, and we are very satisfied with the results. Based on this success, we plan to have future collaborations with Pulsic.”
UniRoute completed the auto routing for the STARC Motif Filter Design while adhering to all design and technology constraints and maintaining minimum area. Importantly, the time taken versus the current methodology, manual layout, was dramatically slashed from 20 hours to just 1.5 hours for the whole design. Because the toolset also contains an online DRC and is connectivity driven, designs are DRC/LVS clean.
One of the several unique features provided by Pulsic’s technology is the tool’s ability to automatically generate signal flow routing, whereby the routing pattern is decided based upon device location and the resulting signal wires are automatically tapered depending on the signal strength.
“STARC works with all players in the semiconductor industry to provide technology enablers that address problems arising from shrinking geometries,” said Mark Williams, founder and CEO of Pulsic. “Having our new analog solutions within UniRoute meet their exacting performance and functional criteria validates our success at helping customers meet extreme design challenges at advanced technology nodes. We are pleased to be able to help STARC member companies improve their analog and mixed-signal design productivity.”
About UniRoute
Pulsic’s shaped-based routing technologies contained within UniRoute have been the leading routing tools for custom IC automation for more than ten years. Using the flexibility of shape-based methodologies, UniRoute incorporates technologies and solutions for analog/mixed signal design, memory design, LCD drivers, and custom digital design. Using UniRoute solutions, layout designers’ productivity increases significantly; without such solutions, a layout designer will typically spend significantly longer periods of time undertaking manual routing using a layout editor. The benchmark for the reference flow was validated on an Open Access database with Cadence’s IC6.1.4 (OA) environment. However, Pulsic also has a DFII interface for Cadence’s CDBA (Cadence Data-Base API), as well as import/export of LEF/DEF for custom routing in digital flows.
About STARC
The Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center (STARC) was founded in December 1995 by Japan’s leading semiconductor manufacturers to strengthen its design competitiveness. STARC has since collaborated with universities to expand the semiconductor research infrastructure at Japanese universities; arranged system-on-chip (SOC) design seminars through cooperation between industry and academia to train specialized chip architects and collectively worked with client companies to develop a suite of technology enablers in order to address design difficulties compounded the shrinking. The results of these projects have been put good use among the semiconductor industry. For more information http://www.starc.jp/index-e.html
About Pulsic
Pulsic is an electronic design automation (EDA) company offering production-proven floorplanning, placement and routing software solutions for extreme design challenges at advanced nodes. Leading companies use Pulsic’s physical design software to improve their design productivity by automating the layout of peripheral and control logic. Complementary to existing design flows, standards, and databases, Pulsic technology delivers handcrafted quality, faster than manual design or general-purpose software solutions. Pulsic has delivered successful tapeouts for IDMs and fabless customers in the memory, FPGA, custom digital, LCD, imaging, and AMS markets worldwide. For more information please visit http://www.pulsic.com
