SAGANTEC UNLEASHES NEXT-GENERATION HIGH-SPEED, HIGH-CAPACITY SOFTWARE FOR DESIGN REUSE

Hurricane for Large Block, Full-Chip Migration of Ultra Deep Submicron Design

MUNICH, Germany, March 8, 1999 -- Sagantec of Fremont, Calif., the leader in physical design migration, today introduced next-generation Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software to accelerate system-on-chip implementation through efficient reuse of hard intellectual property (IP).

HurricaneTM, unveiled this week during the Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE99) Conference and Exhibition in Munich, Germany, is used to migrate large blocks of hard IP, memories and integrated circuits (ICs). The physical design migration software leverages Sagantec's expertise in reuse and re-layout of hard IP for ultra deep submicron design. It optimizes and migrates large IP blocks and full chips to new process technologies. Hurricane migrates large layouts quickly, and has the ability to create denser, more compact layouts. 

"Hurricane is a completely new physical design migration engine that builds on our experience from developing and supporting DREAMTM," says Mahendra Jain, vice president of worldwide marketing at Sagantec. "Many issues related to ultra deep submicron design have been addressed with Hurricane, especially new design rules mandated by the foundries for 0.18-µ and below."

Demonstrations of Hurricane and Sagantec's newly introduced EnCOReTM, a flexible graphical reuse environment, will be shown continuously Wednesday, March 10, through Friday, March 12, during DATE99 at Internationales Congress Centre (also known as The Neue Messe) in the Sagantec Booth #A4.

Hurricane migrates a physical layout design from one process technology to another, adapting it to new -- usually smaller -- process design rules. It works by picking up individual edges in polygons and moving them closer together until constraints, either from a design rule file or from a customer constraint list, are about to be violated. The output is a new GDSII file conforming to new design rules without functional or topological changes.

Using new, faster algorithms for scanning and layout compaction, Hurricane can migrate large layouts of hard IP blocks or full chips quickly and efficiently from one process technology to another. For example, it can migrate and optimize a complete 200,000-transistor block at a speed of approximately 25,000 transistors per hour on one central processing unit (CPU).

"We see a huge productivity gap and, from our perspective, hard IP reuse is the practical solution," affirms Jain. "Reuse of large blocks of hard IP is the most efficient and viable answer for system on chip design."

This new migration engine is intrinsically suited to optimize 45-degree polygon edges for denser, more compact layouts. It is designed to handle user programmable design rules and offers better handling of user constraints. A design rule application feature ensures that Hurricane can handle new ultra deep submicron design rules such as wide metal spacing, minimum area or preferred design rules.

Pricing and Availability

Hurricane will begin volume shipping in July 1999, and will be priced at $350,000 U.S. per seat. It supports Sun Microsystems SparcStation and Sun Ultra running Solaris and HP 9000/700 running UX operating systems. For more details, contact sales at (888) SAGANTEC or via email at info@sagantec.com. 

About Sagantec

Sagantec is the leading supplier of software, methodologies and services that enable the reuse and re-layout of hard IP for deep submicron design. Its tools ensure designers can efficiently implement systems on silicon; meet time to market and time to volume requirements; and take full advantage of the latest process technology, while being assured true process independence. Privately held and funded, Sagantec was founded in 1993 in Israel. Corporate headquarters for its worldwide sales, marketing, technical services and applications organization is located at 46505 Landing Parkway, Fremont, Calif. 94538. Telephone: (510) 360-5200. Facsimile: (510) 360-5255. Its Web Site is located at: http://www.sagantec.com.

Sagantec acknowledges trademarks or registered trademarks of other organizations for their respective products and services.

For more information, contact:
Nanette Collins
(617) 437-1822
nanette@nvc.com