Ambit Adds "Distributed Synthesis" to BuildGates; Capability Dramatically Increases Integration Productivity in Large Designs.SANTA CLARA Santa Clara, city, Cuba Santa Clara (sän`tä klä`rä), city (1994 est. pop. 217,000), capital of Villa Clara prov., central Cuba. , Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 1998--Ambit Design Systems, Inc. today announced a "distributed synthesis" capability in its BuildGates(TM) synthesis tool to increase productivity in multimillion-gate ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Pronounced "a-sick." A chip that is custom designed for a specific application rather than a general-purpose chip such as a microprocessor. design. BuildGates can now automatically synthesize a design in parallel over a network of computers, dramatically reducing synthesis runtime. "Distributed synthesis is one more example of Ambit's commitment to shrinking the synthesis cycle in multimillion-gate IC design," said Venktesh Shukla, Ambit vice president of marketing. "This technology will significantly ease the process of managing synthesis at the chip level." Currently, synthesis of large designs is extremely time consuming and requires a design team to manually partition the blocks of the design, do time budgeting and job scripting, and then reassemble re·as·sem·ble v. re·as·sem·bled, re·as·sem·bling, re·as·sem·bles v.tr. 1. To bring or gather together again: reassembled the band for a reunion tour. 2. the blocks into a complete design. The process is non-intuitive, iterative and laced with timing guesswork. To improve runtime, designers may employ compute farms to spread the job among many workstations, but users are still burdened with manual partitioning, scripting and reassembly reassembly - segmentation . BuildGates' distributed synthesis, however, provides a complete, highly automated solution. Users only need apply top-level constraints and the tool automatically partitions the design, distributes it over a heterogeneous network (networking) heterogeneous network - A network running multiple network layer protocols such as DECnet, IP, IPX, XNS. of NT and/or UNIX UNIX Operating system for digital computers, developed by Ken Thompson of Bell Laboratories in 1969. It was initially designed for a single user (the name was a pun on the earlier operating system Multics). platforms, and reassembles the design. To the user, the complexities of the solution are hidden. Distributed synthesis in BuildGates can also submit the design to any job-queue application the user prefers for execution. The result is an integrated, synthesized design completed in hours instead of weeks. Universal Platform Support BuildGates supports the most popular workstations and operating systems Operating systems can be categorized by technology, ownership, licensing, working state, usage, and by many other characteristics. In practice, many of these groupings may overlap. used in high-end, complex IC design, including Sun, Solaris, and HP. Support for NT-based workstations will be available by the third quarter of this year. BuildGates reduces the time users spend in the synthesis phase of a design by at least 50% and produces improved quality of results. It also offers a 5X to 7X overall capacity improvement over current synthesis methods. Price and Availability The distributed synthesis feature is a part of the BuildGates standard package, and will be available in Q3, 1998 for use on Hewlett-Packard and Solaris UNIX Platforms and all NT platforms. BuildGates U.S. list price begins at $98,000. Ambit Design Systems, Inc., the Superior Synthesis Alternative, is a privately held California company offering innovative synthesis solutions for high-end chip design. Ambit's logic synthesis The conversion of a high-level electronic circuit description into a list of logic gates and their interconnections, called the "netlist." Every logic synthesis program understands some subset of Verilog and VHDL. tool, BuildGates delivers increased productivity on multimillion-gate chip designs without a significant change in the design methodology. Ambit technology is used by major microprocessor, multimedia and communications vendors worldwide, supported by leading ASIC manufacturers with advance process libraries, and endorsed by leading EDA companies  The external links in this article or section may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies. . Upside Magazine recently placed Ambit among the "Hot 100" private companies for 1998. For more information, call 888/GO-AMBIT or visit the Ambit website at www.ambit.com CONTACT: Ambit Susan Lippincott, 408/566-8027 susanl@ambit.com or VitalCom Lou Covey or Scott Seiden, 650/637-8212 lou@vitalcompr.com |
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