Tuesday April 29, 2008, PT

Incentia Announces ECOCraft, New Tool for Post-Layout Hold Time ECO
10X Faster on Hold Time Closure, Parallel MMMC Support

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - April 29, 2008 – Incentia Design Systems, Inc., a technology leader in nanometer timing analysis and design closure solutions, today announced the availability of ECOCraft, a tool that focuses on hold time Engineer Changing Order (ECO) applied at post layout stage. Built on top of Incentia's TimeCraft™, the world fastest and sign-off proven static timing analyzer (STA), ECOCraft performs ECO and timing updates seamlessly within a single tool environment. The end results include faster timing closure, improved quality, and increased productivity.

Due to process variations in nanometer designs, more corners (temperature, voltage, best case, worst case, etc) need to be covered than before. Different design modes (function, test, scan, etc.) also add to the complexity. Fixing hold time violations under Multi-Mode Multi-Corner (MMMC) conditions becomes a major challenge. ECOCraft inserts a minimal number of delays to fix hold time violations under MMMC at one time, while keeping setup times intact. To reduce total turnaround time and achieve fast hold time closure, all the corresponding MMMC processes can be distributed to network machines and run in parallel.

Most ECO tools are stand alone solutions, providing the ECO function without a built-in timing engine. They rely heavily on interfaces to and from a third party static timing analysis tool. Inefficiency is unavoidable due to the communications between files with large amounts of data. Since ECOCraft integrates the TimeCraft timing engine, ECO and timing analysis are done in one tool. Together with the parallel MMMC support, a 10x runtime improvement can be easily achieved.

"ECOCraft has been used at various customer sites and has successfully taped out designs from 10 million gates to over 20 million gates," said Arthur Wei, Vice President of Operations at Incentia. "We are pleased to receive positive feedback from customers. This reinforces our commitment to provide the best-of-the-class timing and design tools to our customers."

ECOCraft

ECOCraft is a post layout hold time optimization tool. Once your design is free of setup time violations, it tries to fix hold time violations under MMMC simultaneously, without violating setup times. It adopts an innovative algorithm that fixes the largest amount of hold time violations with a minimal number of delay insertions. The impact to layout is therefore minimized. Due to the tightly integrated ECO and TimeCraft timing engine, runtime is 8X to 10X faster than other existing solutions. To further reduce total turnaround time, all the corresponding MMMC processes can be distributed to network machines and run in parallel.

Price and Availability

The ECOCraft release is available now for Sun Solaris (32-bit and 64-bit) and Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) platforms. For pricing and availability information, please contact Incentia at info@incentia.com.

About Incentia

Incentia Design Systems, Inc. is a leading Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tool provider of advanced Timing Analysis, Design Closure, and Logic Synthesis software for multi-million-gate nanometer designs. Incentia patented technologies provide the fastest Static Timing Analysis (STA) tool in the market today. Incentia's products are in use at leading semiconductor, fabless IC design, systems, and design service companies worldwide and have produced numerous successful tape-outs in different design application areas, such as communications, networking, wireless, chip-sets, consumer electronics, and multi-media. Incentia has offices in Santa Clara, California and Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan, and distributors in Japan, India, China, Korea, and Israel. For more information, please email to info@incentia.com or call 408-727-8988.

Press Contact:
Arthur Wei
Incentia Design Systems, Inc.
+1 408-727-8988 X120
Email Contact

TimeCraft is a trademark of Incentia Design Systems, Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective holders.