Blaze DFM Announces Blaze MO Release 1.1; Industry's First Electrical DFM Product Refined Through Customer Projects.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Blaze DFM, Inc. today announced the Release 1.1 update to Blaze MO(TM) optimization software, the company's path-breaking "Electrical DFM" solution. The focus of the release was to incorporate customer feedback garnered from projects using Blaze MO. The main areas of development included reducing runtime to meet customer turnaround time requirements, improving ease of design team adoption, and enhancing optimization quality for better leakage power and variability reduction.

"We've seen tremendous results at our customers in terms of reducing leakage power and leakage variability, resulting in substantial, double-digit gains in parametric yield," said Jacob Jacobsson, CEO at Blaze. "With the improvements that we've made in Blaze MO Release 1.1, we offer even more compelling bottom-line benefits to companies designing sub-100nm chips."

Blaze MO Release 1.1

Based on customer feedback received during initial tapeouts, Blaze determined that the primary focuses for this release were to be runtime, further reduction of leakage and leakage variability, analysis enhancements, and auto-correlation to golden signoff tools. From internal benchmarks performed on customer designs, Release 1.1 is up to five times (5X) faster than the previous version. Blaze MO release 1.1 includes advances to every major function of the software. It offers patent-pending auto-correlation to existing golden timing and signal integrity signoff tools, which substantially improves the ease of incorporating Blaze MO into the customer design environment. The strengthened signal integrity analyses further improve leakage optimization quality of results by reducing the need for guardbanding in the design team's Blaze MO optimization methodology. The analysis engines have been enhanced to account for leakage variation caused by both systematic and random sources. The optimization engine was enhanced to support process-window awareness when choosing among available variants. Lastly, the annotation flow was extended to support manufacturability awareness in the generation of OPC directives.

Pricing and Availability

Blaze MO Release 1.1 is available today on all supported hardware platforms as a free upgrade for customers under current maintenance agreements.

Electrical DFM

Electrical DFM solutions eclipse the "shape-centric" DFM tools from other vendors by providing significant gains in parametric yield, reduced power, and improved performance for sub-100nm process technologies. Unlike earlier DFM approaches, which are geometric in nature, electrical DFM uses design intent information (such as timing constraints) to drive a manufacturing-aware optimization of the design. Electrical DFM, the basis of Blaze technology, is based on the pioneering research of Professor Andrew B. Kahng, co-founder, chairman, and CTO at Blaze, and his group at the University of California, San Diego, to which Blaze has obtained exclusive license.

About Blaze DFM

Blaze DFM provides software solutions to fabless semiconductor companies, integrated device manufacturers and silicon foundries. Our products give IC designers greater control over manufacturing variability, improving yield and shortening time to volume production. Blaze DFM, Inc., 1275 Orleans Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089, 408-470-4900, http://www.blaze-dfm.com.