Altos Design Automation Inc. Releases Variety LX to Enable Ultra-Fast Corner and...

Altos Design Automation Inc. Releases Variety LX to Enable Ultra-Fast Corner and Statistical Characterization for 45nm and Below

New Product Supports Electromigration, CCS/ECSM Power Formats and
Improved Automation for Complex Digital and Analog Cells
ANAHEIM, Calif.--(Business Wire)--
Altos Design Automation Inc. today announced Variety LX, a new
advanced product that unifies corner characterization (Liberate(tm))
and statistical characterization (Variety(tm)) into a single
characterization platform.

New capabilities available in Variety LX include: 1) generation of
current source dynamic power models (CCS and ECSM); 2)
characterization of current density to enable electromigration
analysis; 3) a 2X speedup improvement for statistical modeling and 4)
a faster interface to external SPICE simulators that cuts
characterization time in half; 5) support for coarse grained low power
cell types such as footer and header switches.

Altos's "inside view" technology has been expanded to support
complex custom digital cells including automatic vector generation for
cells with large pin counts, support for cells with multiple internal
states such as pipeline flip-flops and simultaneous input switching
delay modeling. For analog and complex I/O cells, Variety LX supports
characterization using an arbitrary test harness, delay measurement of
differential signals including relative voltage swings, IBIS 4.2
format and current mode logic (CML).

"We selected Variety LX because our 45nm and below STARCAD-CEL
design flow needs both sophisticated corner libraries that can model
low power and statistical timing models that account for process
variation," Nobuyuki Nishiguchi, vice president and general manager at
STARC said. "Using Variety LX we are able to very quickly generate the
large number of views that are needed for both nominal and statistical
signoff."

Aki Fujimura, CEO at Direct2Silicon, Inc., said, "Our
Virtualmask(tm) technology requires optimized physical cell libraries
for direct write electron-beam lithography." Fujimura continued, "We
are using the Altos characterization tools because they can very
efficiently re-characterize our library to ensure that there is no
performance penalty between the ebeam optimized version and the
original. We are also very impressed by the "inside view" automatic
vector generation feature that finds missing worst-case conditions
that are often overlooked by other characterization tools."

Jim McCanny, Altos CEO and founder said, "Characterization plays a
significant role in enabling designers to meet all the challenges of
performance, cost, yield, switching power, reliability and leakage
when designing at advanced process nodes." McCanny continued, "We
created Variety LX to support customers who are using a mixture of
statistical and corner analysis tools who wanted both data consistency
and a common interface."

About Variety LX

Variety LX is an ultra-fast library creator that generates
electrical models in Liberty(R), Verilog, Vital and IBIS formats.
Variety LX supports all the latest models for timing, noise and power
such as CCS (Composite Current Source) and ECSM (Effective Current
Source Models) including the statistical ECSM and CCS variation
extensions required to support statistical static timing analysis
(SSTA). Variety LX also supports ultra low power and high speed design
styles that include power gating cells, state retention registers,
level shifters, pulse clocking and CML.

Pricing and Availability

Variety LX is available now; pricing starts at $120K per year.

About Altos

Altos Design Automation provides ultra-fast, fully-automated
characterization technology for the creation of library views for
timing, signal integrity and power analysis and optimization. Altos
advanced modeling solutions are used by both corner-based and
statistical-based design implementation flows to reduce time to market
and improve yield.

Privately held, Altos was founded in 2005 in Santa Clara, CA. Its
corporate headquarters is at 4020 Moorpark Ave., Suite 100, San Jose,
CA 95117. Telephone: (408) 980-8056. On the Web at:
http://www.altos-da.com

Altos Design Automation
Jim McCanny, 408-373-5710
jmccanny@altos-da.com
or
LPR
Ed Lee, 650-363-0142
ed@leepr.com
Susan McMahon, 831-331-5277

Copyright Business Wire 2008