Satin IP Technologies, Toppan Photomasks and XYALIS Partner to Improve Design for Mask Manufacturing

MONTPELLIER, France & ROUSSET, France & GRENOBLE, France--(Business Wire)--
Satin IP Technologies SAS, Toppan Photomasks France SAS and XYALIS SaRL have
collaborated within the Crystal partnership program to significantly improve
design for mask manufacturing (DFMM) by breaking the barriers that have
traditionally separated integrated chip (IC) designers from mask shop engineers.
Crystal is a European collaborative R&D program sponsored by the Cluster for
Application and Technology Research in Europe on NanoElectronics (CATRENE).
Other participants include Atmel and CEA-LETI.

While the old design rule checkers (DRC) developed into sophisticated and
pro-active design for manufacturing (DFM) tool suites, the mask rules checks are
still implemented at the final phase when the GDSII data is released. Resolution
enhancement techniques (RET) and optical proximity correction (OPC) further
restrict the ability to revise the design or even to take into account the mask
manufacturability issues for an additional design cycle.

One of the Crystal work packages is devoted to identification and formalization
of recommended design practices to make mask manufacturing a more efficient and
less iterative process. Crystal will also provide the tools to deploy and
monitor those practices throughout the design chain.

"Designing chips so that photomasks can be manufactured more easily is a complex
challenge that cannot be solved without tight collaboration between chip design
teams, semiconductor fabs, mask shops and EDA vendors," said Michel Tissier,
European technology integration director at Toppan Photomasks France and head of
the Crystal program. "By making these different groups work with Satin IP`s VIP
Lane on real manufacturing data, Crystal is expected to help improve design
consistency, on-time delivery and the cost of photomask design."

Michel Tabusse, founder and CEO of Satin IP Technologies, said, "It is Satin
IP`s core business to help deploy and improve design quality practices
throughout semiconductor companies with maximum adoption rate by the design
teams. Crystal will give us access to real data about the manufacturing
challenges at mask shops and about the design practices in the upstream design
phases that would solve these challenges. We plan to use these data to create an
unmatched library of DFMM quality checks as an add-on to VIP Lane, our design
quality closure solution."

Eric Beisser, founder and CEO of XYALIS, added, "Problems that increase the
length or number of design cycles, or mistakes that cause additional re-spins of
a die, can make the difference between profit and loss for a new product or even
result in project cancellation. With photomask manufacturing costs representing
almost 10% of global costs at the 65nm node, we expect that the DFMM practices
that Crystal is documenting for the design community will be of very significant
impact."

The Crystal program was started in January 2008. A design environment prototype,
offering a first set of design rules with monitoring capabilities and links to
mask data preparation tools, was demonstrated during the Euro Nanoelectronics
Forum in Paris (December 2-3, 2008). An updated prototype will be shown at the
Satin IP booth, # 1825, at the Design Automation Conference (San Francisco, July
27-30) -- www.dac.com/46th/index.aspx

About Satin IP Technologies

Committed to design quality closure with fast return on investment (ROI), Satin
IP Technologies delivers software solutions for fact-based design quality
monitoring. Working within customers' design flows, VIP Lane turns customers'
existing design practices for IP blocks or SoCs into a robust set of quality
criteria and automates the implementation and documentation of design quality
metrics at no extra cost in engineering time or resources. VIP Lane shortens
time-to-market by delivering effective flow integration and on-the-fly quality
monitoring at zero overhead to design teams. Satin IP is a privately-held
company with headquarters in Montpellier, France. For more information, see
www.satin-ip.com

About Toppan Photomasks

Toppan Photomasks, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Toppan Printing Co.,
Ltd. a diversified global company with revenue in excess of $13 billion in
fiscal 2007. Toppan Photomasks is part of the Toppan Group of photomask
companies. As the world`s premier photomask provider, the Toppan Group operates
the industry`s most advanced and largest network of manufacturing facilities and
offers a comprehensive range of photomask technologies and research and
development capabilities to meet the increasingly sophisticated and divergent
product and service requirements of the global semiconductor industry. Toppan
Photomasks is headquartered in Round Rock, Texas. For more information visit
www.photomask.com

About XYALIS

Established in 1998, XYALIS is privately held company, headquartered in
Grenoble, France. XYALIS expertise and its success history are quite unique in
the EDA industry. From the beginning, the company has focused on Design For
Manufacturing tools and solutions to solve complex problems found between design
and manufacturing. This area is now called DFM and is popular in the papers and
symposiums. Thanks to its founders who have a very deep knowledge and experience
in this field XYALIS has been able to innovate and provide new solutions to
solve problems faced by engineers today. XYALIS focuses on two main flows of the
layout finishing process: Metal filling to address Chemical Mechanical Polishing
(CMP) issues and Mask data preparation.

XYALIS' solutions have been developed in cooperation with major semiconductor
industry leaders and have been used in production for the most advanced
processes (65nm and below).

For more information visit www.xyalis.com.

For Satin IP Technologies:
Michel Tabusse, +33 (0)467 13 00 87
or
Cayenne Communication
Linda Marchant, 919-451-0776 (USA)
linda.marchant@cayennecom.com
or
For Toppan Photomasks:
Michel Tissier, +33 (0)4 42 29 13 62
michel.tissier@photomask.com
or
For XYALIS:
Eric Beisser, +33 (0)476 70 64 75
ebeisser@xyalis.com
Farid Benzakour, +33 (0)476 70 61 85
fbenzacour@xyalis.com

Copyright Business Wire 2009