Sagantec Increases Support for Deep Submicron Design

Sagantec Increases Support for Deep Submicron Design Option Enhances Productivity, Improves Physical Design for Better Performance, Manufacturing Yield

FREMONT, Calif., June 7, 1999 - Sagantec of Fremont, Calif., provider of physical design migration software, today added an option to its Electronic Design Automation (EDA) suite to improve physical layout for deep submicron (DSM) process technologies.

Developed with input from leading European semiconductor companies, the DSM Preferred Rules (DPR) option takes maximum advantage of DSM process technologies for enhanced designer productivity, improved manufacturing yield and better performance. It is an option to Sagantec's physical design migration software HurricaneTM, DREAMTM (Design Rule Enforcement and Migration) and CompanionTM. It can also be used with EnCOReTM (Environment for Core Optimization and Reuse), a graphical user interface (GUI) for hard intellectual property (IP) migration from Sagantec.

"DPR further leverages Sagantec's expertise in reuse and re-layout of hard IP for DSM design because it fully utilize the new manufacturing capabilities," says Mahendra Jain, vice president of worldwide marketing at Sagantec. "Customer input and feedback ensures that it will be essential for leading-edge designers concerned about DSM effects."

Sagantec's entire suite of software will be continuously demonstrated at the 36th Design Automation Conference (DAC) Monday, June 21, through Wednesday, June 23, at Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, La., in Booth #2050

The DSM Preferred Rules Optionr

Benefits of using DPR include improved productivity, manufacturing and yield, along with improved signal integrity, reduce power and enhanced performance.

Design rule documents describing geometry rules for DSM processes of 0.25-micron and below are becoming more complex with each new process generation, making it more difficult for software to implement and verify them. DPR is intended to cover these new rules to correctly implement DSM requirements.

It includes preferred rule features to specify a preferred value, along with the minimum requirement for each design rule. From there, Hurricane, DREAM and Companion use the minimum value only where needed to obtain the smallest possible cell dimension. Wherever allowed, the preferred value will be automatically implemented. Preferred rule values can be prioritized to reflect their importance for yield and performance.

"Preferred design rule values are not something nice to have," says Chris Strolenberg, product architect at Sagantec. "They are absolutely mandatory if the design is to be manufacturable. If all distances between layout features are minimum distances, the chances of obtaining working silicon are miniscule. Having software that implements non-minimum feature sizes wherever possible is essential."

DPR improves signal integrity, reduces power and enhances performance. By enlarging the spacing between routing signals to non-minimal distances, the cross-coupling capacitance between signal pairs is reduced as well as crosstalk. The reduction in capacitance will result in less power consumption and higher operating frequencies. Crosstalk problems that threaten the functionality of the design will be reduced.

Finally, it helps determine the trade off between yield and performance.

DPR will be available in Q3 1999 as an option to Hurricane and DREAM and Companion. It will be priced from $20,000 U.S. It supports Sun Microsystems 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.