MunEDA's Tool Family, WiCkeD, is Selected by Faraday for its Analog IP Porting.

HSIN-CHU, Taiwan & MUNICH, Germany -- MunEDA today announced that it has entered a long-term licensing agreement with Faraday Technology regarding MunEDA's DFM-DFY tool family- WiCkeD. As one of the leading fabless ASIC and silicon intellectual property (SIP) vendors, Faraday adopts powerful tools for the internal IP Porting and Technology Migration flow. By choosing MunEDA's leading-edge technology to improve design performance and yield, Faraday is well armed for the new challenges in the nano era.

"MunEDA's WiCkeD plays an important role in our IP porting project, and it presents the capabilities as an optimization tool. Through its comprehensive GUI and script-based flow, we successfully demonstrate our optimized circuit process. Also, the capacity is a common issue for the simulation-based optimization tool, and we are glad to have WiCkeD to solve it..." Said Thomas Hsieh, R&D Associate Vice President at Faraday.

Techniques used for Faraday's automated IP Porting Flow include MunEDA tools for Constraint Management, Feasibility optimization, Simulation Environment, Sensitivity Analysis, Nominal Diagnosis and Nominal Optimization. These are incorporated into an automated script-based IP porting flow that can significantly speed up the technology migration of analog library cells, which is crucial for most analogue designs. In the next stage, MunEDA plans to also include its statistical analysis and yield optimization methods into Faraday's design flow.

"Analog synthesis is a dream feature for IP vendors. Faraday has been accumulating the experience and capability of analog IP porting as well as analog synthesis. We appreciate WiCkeD can help on this," said Yeong-Jar Chang, Deputy Director of Infrastructure R&D Center at Faraday.

"We are impressed with the fact that the porting process was successfully driven from 0.18um to 90 nm in less than 90 minutes, including the layout, by the script language provided by WiCkeD in the optimization plan .For a designer without this tool, the same task commonly requires days of efforts. The simple setup procedure and intuitive flow especially make WiCkeD a useful tool kit for automatic circuit optimization," said David Wu, R&D Technical Director at Faraday.

"We very much welcome Faraday as MunEDA's new customer and partner," stated Andreas Ripp, Vice President of Sales & Marketing and Managing Director at MunEDA. "Being an integral part of Faraday's IP porting flow is an excellent application for our analysis and optimization technology. As Faraday is a leader in ASIC and SIP worldwide, we are glad that we can contribute to their design efficiency and assurance of design quality".

About Faraday Technology Corporation

Faraday Technology Corporation is a leading fabless ASIC vendor as well as a silicon intellectual property (SIP) provider. Faraday has been acknowledged its innovative power with over 3,000 successful designs, along with nearly 100 million ASIC chips shipped annually worldwide. The ability in attaining an economic scale in top quality ASIC products has allowed Faraday to establish an enormous IP data bank. Faraday's ASIC and IP business models complement each other, which contributes as the key to its success. Faraday was founded in 1993. Faraday posted 171 million US dollars revenues for 2006 and currently employs approximately 700 people worldwide. Faraday is a public traded company in the Taipei stock exchange with its headquarters in Taiwan, and affiliates in the United States, Japan, China, and Europe. For more information, please visit www.faraday-tech.com.

About MunEDA

MunEDA provides leading EDA technology for analysis and optimization of yield and performance of analog, mixed-signal and digital designs. MunEDA's products and consulting enable customers to reduce the design times of their circuits and to maximize robustness and yield. MunEDA's solutions are in industrial use by leading semiconductor companies in the areas of communication, computer, memories, automotive, and consumer electronics. WiCkeD is a comprehensive and powerful software tool suite for interactive, manual, semi- and full automatic analysis, sizing, and yield optimization of analog and mixed signal circuits. For more information, please visit the MunEDA web site at www.muneda.com.