Blaze DFM Announces Blaze MO - the First ''Electrical DFM'' Solution.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Blaze DFM today introduced Blaze MO(TM) optimization software, the industry's first electrical DFM solution. Blaze MO equips chip designers with the power to get the most out of 90nm and below process technologies. With Blaze MO, designers drive their power and performance requirements into the manufacturing flow, effectively "turbo charging" the manufacturing process. Blaze-enhanced designs are faster, less leaky and have better parametric yield.

Substantial Leakage Power Improvement

"Blaze MO has delivered eye-opening results," said Dave Reed, Blaze co-founder and vice president, marketing and business development. "In side-by-side silicon comparisons on a triple-Vt low-leakage 90nm process, one customer was able to reduce average leakage power by more than 21 percent on a high-volume consumer product, while cutting leakage variability by 26 percent, without making any design modifications. The net result was a substantial double-digit increase in parametric yield."

Harnessing Power & Timing Requirements to Drive Manufacturing

Blaze MO uses a design's power and timing requirements to drive the manufacturing process. This results in significant improvements in leakage power, leakage variability, and timing. The economic impact of the improvement in parametric yield can be enormous. Blaze MO tailors the manufacturing process for each individual design by providing design-specific guidance to the design-to-mask flow, so the chip designer is assured of realizing the full potential from advanced processes. Blaze MO has been proven on 90nm and 65nm customer designs to reduce leakage power by up to 40 percent and leakage variability by up to 60 percent and to improve timing by as much as 10 percent.

Hassle-free DFM

Blaze MO does not require chip designers to change their existing design flow, golden signoff methodology, or handoff to manufacturing. Blaze MO can be transparently plugged into any existing design flow and works hand-in-hand with resolution enhancement software used by the foundry.

Unlike DFM analysis tools from competing vendors, Blaze MO provides electrical design for manufacturing optimization, not just problem reports. Blaze MO uses manufacturing-aware analyses to drive optimization of the design handoff to manufacturing, directly increasing the number of chips that meet power and timing specifications across the process window. The value of Blaze MO has been proven in silicon and validated on production designs at a number of top-tier IDMs, fabless semiconductor companies, and foundries.

"STMicroelectronics is addressing many consumer and communications markets, where both dynamic and static power are key product differentiators, in order to increase battery life, or simply to fit into cheaper packages," said Philippe Magarshack, FTM Group Vice-President, Central CAD & Design Solutions General Manager.

"Early on, when engaging into 90nm, and now in 65nm, we recognized the importance of leakage-power minimization. So, we were very pleased when Blaze MO was able to further optimize leakage out of an already extensively optimized processor core. We intend to apply Blaze MO to production tape-outs in the next 2 to 3 quarters."

Design Flow Integration and Foundry Support

Blaze MO is built on the Open Access database. It integrates easily into existing design flows from Cadence, Synopsys, or Magma using industry standard file formats, including SDC, Liberty, Verilog, LEF/DEF, DSPF, SPEF, SPICE and GDSII. Blaze MO output can be used to drive any commercial OPC tool. Blaze MO is supported by major foundries on many popular 90nm and 65nm processes. Contact the company for details.

Availability and Platform Support

Blaze MO is available today. It is supported on Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL3, RHEL4), SUSE Linux (SLES 9) on 32/64 bit Intel or AMD-based platforms and Solaris 8+ on Sparc 64 bit platform.

About Blaze DFM

Blaze DFM provides "Electrical DFM" solutions to integrated device manufacturers (IDMs), fabless semiconductor companies and silicon foundries. Today, chip designers are facing new challenges that are unique to process technologies of 90 nanometers and below, chief among them - leakage power. Prior generation DFM tools are purely geometric and have no knowledge of the electrical characteristics of the chip. Blaze's flagship product, Blaze MO, is the first of a new generation of electrical DFM solutions with the ability to drive power and timing requirements downstream into manufacturing and bring manufacturing awareness upstream into design. Electrical DFM solutions offer dramatic improvements in leakage power, leakage variability and timing, with a very low cost of adoption. Blaze DFM, Inc., 1275 Orleans Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089, 408-470-4900, http://www.blaze-dfm.com.