|
|
|
Design Software Customer Engagements Verisity Ltd. and Hewlett-Packard Co. announced today a finalized purchase agreement for acquisition of Verisity's Specman tool for internal use by HP's ProCurve Networking division. Specman automates the functional verification process and aims to improve time to market for complex chip designs. Specman provides an integrated solution for automating functional verification, with such features as constraint-driven test generation, automatic data and temporal checking, functional coverage analysis, and tight links to popular VHDL/Verilog simulators. Mountain View, Calif.-based Juniper Networks, a developer of integrated hardware and software solutions for the Internet, has standardized on Design Acceleration Inc.'s DAI Signalscan TX for their Verilog waveform viewing and simulation debugging environment. Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands has standardized on Mentor Graphics' WorkXpert technical process management tools to capture, manage and track their printed circuit board (PCB) design process. Additionally, Philips has partnered with Mentor Consulting, the professional services division of Mentor Graphics, to implement a global development environment that will enable Philips worldwide team of engineers to leverage the company's PCB design and manufacturing resources. The global product development environment is meant to enable product development groups to partition designs into multiple blocks, and to assign design teams to work on them concurrently through all phases of design, verification and layout. Designers will have access to reusable intellectual property in the form of a proven PCB layout for designs that include blocks from existing products. Engineering teams can then automatically merge block layouts into a top-level PCB layout for a complete assembled design, Mentor said. Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. purchased a 3-year volume license for Simplex Solutions' interconnect verification tool suite and said it plans to use Simplex's products in its corporate engineering group as well as all of its U.S. design centers. Vitesse is adopting Simplex's Fire & Ice and Thunder & Lightning tools for full-chip 3D extraction and analysis on its high-speed designs targeted for 622Mb/s, 1.0Gb/s, 2.5Gb/s and 10Gb/s. Vitesse said an important factor in its selection of Simplex tools was the tight integration with the Cadence Design Systems physical design and timing tools used by Vitesse and its customers. The company also said that in benchmarks, Fire & Ice repeatedly delivered extraction correlation within 10 percent of silicon where other tools were up in the 20-40 percent error range. The company is using the Simplex tools to extract all signal nets for designs that run a range of speeds, from 150MHz to 10GHz. Toshiba America Electronics Corp. (TAEC) selected Chrysalis Symbolic Design's Design Verifyer equivalency checker for their gate-to-gate formal verification software platform. "We were spending thousands of hours on gate-level simulation for regression analysis and needed to streamline our design process through the use of formal verification. Chrysalis' Design VERIFYer is a proven solution for gate-to-gate comparisons," stated Jeff Berkman, vp of SLI engineering for TAEC. "Additionally, Chrysalis' application expertise and support is excellent." Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Avant! Corp. entered into a $16 million multi-year agreement with Broadcom Corp., which includes Avant!'s very deep submicron circuit design and process modeling tools: Planet-PL, Apollo, Saturn, Hercules, Mars and Star-RC. Broadcom will use the tools in the development of system-on-chip solutions for digital communications products. Toshiba America Electronic Components integrated Synopsys' PrimeTime, a full-chip, static timing analysis and sign-off tool into its system-level integration/ASIC enhanced sign-off flow for TC220 (0.3-micron) and TC240 (0.25-micron) technologies. Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp. (E&S) recently signed a $1.3 million purchase agreement for IKOS Systems' emulation solutions and consulting services. E&S will use IKOS products to verify its next-generation high-performance desktop graphics products, IKOS reported. Tools IC package design software provider Xynetix Design Systems announced its next generation tool, Encore 2.0, aimed at reducing cycle times and improving performance, especially for high-I/O applications like ASICs, DSPs and microprocessor packaging. Improvements in the tool are based on partnerships with IC and advanced packaging customers such as Amkor, ChipPAC and Lucent Technologies. Encore 2.0 provides new technology in three areas: high density wirebonding, flip chip routing and die/package analysis. Encore 2.0 is available now for Windows NT and UNIX platforms. Summit Design added VHDL support to its HDLScore tool, which means that design and verification engineers can use one tool for both code and finite state machine (FSM) coverage for VHDL and Verilog designs. HDLScore, introduced in June of this year, brought together into one tool the power of the best-in-class VeriCov code coverage tool with StateScore, an advanced tool for automatic extraction and coverage of FSMs. With the addition of VHDL, HDLScore is now the only product to fully integrate VHDL, Verilog and FSM coverage. Hewlett-Packard recently introduced the HP Momentum circuit designer. The software, developed by the HP EEsof division, enables engineers to perform electromagnetic (EM) analysis, layout and linear analysis of their circuit designs in a single environment. "This offering is part of our vision of a complete, integrated solution for end-to-end communications signal-path design," said Jake Egbert, GM of the EEsof division. HP Momentum circuit designer's EM technology includes strip-slot computation, adaptive frequency sampling, edge mesh, open and closed environment, DC and low-frequency calculations and geometry meshing. The software also provides direct file compatibility with the HP Advanced Design System and the ability to upgrade to the full product. The HP Momentum circuit designer is priced at $29,000 and is available immediately for PCs using Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 operating systems. Viewlogic Systems, the "e-product" design software supplier recently spun out of Synopsys, has introduced Library Studio incorporated with its Design Exchange solution. Library Studio drives an enterprise's design process through the creation of a design re-use and vendor-neutral EDA library. These libraries can be managed, published and accessed over a company's intranet by global design teams. Viewlogic claims Library Studio reduces errors caused by wrong part selection and increases design productivity by promoting design re-use. Design Exchange provides a Web-based infrastructure and an integrated solution set for the design creation and collaboration process. Page 1 of 2 |