Avant! Announces HPO, A High-Performance Option To ArcCell-XO For Hierarchical IC Physical Design.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 6, 1996--Avant! Corporation (Nasdaq:AVNT), the leader in deep submicron technology, today announced HPO, a high-performance option for the company's successful ArcCell-XO place and route software for IC design. Using HPO, designers can expect to achieve smaller, faster chips in a shorter amount of time than they could using traditional place and route software.

HPO was developed to optimize the performance and area of complex high-performance digital and mixed-signal (analog and digital) ICs. To control IC performance, designers of these chips usually employ a hierarchical structured-custom design methodology. This new product also optimizes the top-level physical layout when many blocks, buses and cells are present.

In addition to the all-path timing-driven placement and all-path timing-driven global routing in ArcCell (both BV, the basic version; and XO, the extended option) HPO includes consistent all-path timing-driven detailed routing. This new product allows accurate timing control to avoid intra-layer parasitic loading effects. Since it is timing-driven, it is different from traditional spacing-rule-based ad-hoc methods which generally incur an unacceptable area penalty of as much as 40 percent to 50 percent of the chip area.

HPO is the industry's first all-path timing-driven detailed routing technology developed specifically for high-performance designs. HPO also includes flexible bus routing and control of preferred routing direction in different regions of a chip. It effectively optimizes the top-level routing density and data bus performance when many blocks and cells are present.

HPO automates many tedious tasks which otherwise would have to be done manually, saving valuable design time. In addition to the flexibility of the existing ArcCell product, which already allows every signal to be routed with a different width and spacing. HPO allows layer control and shielding for each signal. The shielding and grounding of the shields are automatically created based on a newly developed shape based operation that is especially useful for minimizing crosstalk and preventing sensitive signals from being affected by noisy signals.

HPO also includes advanced features such as differential-pair routing and impedance-matching routing for the most stringent performance control.

With the global optimization of ArcCell for complex designs, the resulting physical layout is very dense. Sometimes "push and shove" operations can help designers do final local changes after a layout is completed. HPO also includes a "push and shove" capability implemented with the same shape-based operation.

IC designers have a complete set of deep submicron hierarchical timing-driven design tools by combining Avant!'s all-path timing driven floorplanner (Planet), all-path timing-driven place and route system (ArcCell), physical optimization (Solar), accurate full chip-extraction and delay analysis (Star), and hierarchical verification (VeriCheck).

Price and Availability

Avant! will demonstrate the new software at the Design Automation Conference in Las Vegas, Nev., June 3-6. The company currently expects to ship HPO in the third quarter of this year. This new ArcCell-XO option will include timing-driven detailed routing, flexible bus routing, signal layer control, preferred routing layer control, signal shielding, and differential-pair routing. Impedance-matching and "push and shove" capabilities will be available later in the year.

As with ArcCell-XO, HPO runs on engineering workstations from Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. U.S. pricing starts at $95,000.

Avant! Corporation develops, markets and supports integrated circuit design automation (ICDA) software for deep submicron ICs, microprocessors, microcontrollers, application-specific standard products (ASSPs) and complex application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Company headquarters are located in Sunnyvale, California, telephone [phone]. World Wide Web site: http://www.avanticorp.com. -0-

Note to Editors: Planet, Smart Extraction, Solar and Star are trademarks and ArcCell and VeriCheck are registered trademarks of Avant! Corporation. All other names are the property of their respective holders and should be treated as such.

CONTACT: Avant! Corporation

Lois DuBois, 408/523-8857 or 408/738-8881

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