Pyxis Announces NexusRoute, DFM-aware, Yield-driven Auto Router.

Customers Have Increased Design Yield by as Much as 10%

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Pyxis Technology, the design for manufacturability (DFM) routing company, today announced NexusRoute, the industry's only DFM-aware, yield-driven auto router that comprehends and optimizes manufacturability and yield concurrently with the actual routing and timing closure process. Architected for process technologies of 65 nm and below, NexusRoute has been used by integrated circuit (IC) engineers to reduce design closure and manufacturing cycle time and increases chip yield by as much as 10 percent.

As silicon process technologies progress from 90nm to 65nm and below, design engineers are faced with longer runtimes, more timing closure issues, and more iterations, both pre- and post-tape-out, to handle the increasing effects of design-based yield limiters. Design-based yield limiters result in lower chip performance, higher manufacturing costs, and lower overall chip yield. Because these limiters are chip layout-specific, they cannot simply be removed by product engineers working in a fab, but must be "designed out" from the very beginning of the design process.

NexusRoute Improves Design Closure Cycle Time and Chip Yield

At 45nm, existing routing architectures can no longer handle the complex interactions between design and process. NexusRoute, which can be easily integrated into existing design flows using open industry standard interfaces, benefits designers by:

* scaling with the newer technologies (providing up to 4X gains in design and manufacturing closure time)

* handling the new complex design rules of nanometer technologies

* simultaneously optimizing design for timing, manufacturability and yield, which delivers up to a 10 percent increase in yield over existing solutions.

What Users Are Saying

"We have done a great deal of work with Pyxis Technology and we have qualified NexusRoute for our advance 45nm process technology." - Ward Vercruysse, Director CAD, Silicon Design Engineering, AMD 

"The combination of Pyxis' NexusRoute DFM-aware router and Tachyon[TM] Lithography Aware Design (LAD) allows customers to easily integrate design-for-manufacturing into their advanced technology design flows." - Jim Wiley, Senior Technical Director of Brion Technologies, an ASML company

"DFM is proving to be key in achieving fast product ramps at the sub-65nm technology nodes, and we constantly evaluate technologies which can help our customers get to market faster. We see promise in the Pyxis approach and the potential of its technology to benefit our customers." - Walter Ng, Senior Director of Platform Alliances at Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd.

"Cswitch is building a complex high-performance, resource-rich configurable networking fabric where performance and yield will be of great value. We believe Pyxis has a technology that can assist us in both of these imperatives." - Doug Laird, CEO, Cswitch Corporation

"We evaluated the Pyxis tool on a complex, highly-utilized design and we were surprised to see a significant increase in predicted yield." - Doug Stiles, XBox Design Infrastructure Manager, Microsoft Corporation 

"Pyxis NexusRoute has comprehensive support for our pDfx[R] solutions. NexusRoute is designed to allow our clients to optimize chip layout while maximizing product yield and manufacturability."- Kimon Michaels, co-founder and VP, Design for Manufacturability, PDF Solutions 

"Ponte enjoys a very synergistic relationship with Pyxis Technology via both our Building Bridges [TM] partnership program and as DFM services partners. Several benchmarks have used a combination of our yield sensitivity analysis and Pyxis' routing technology to create a design-for-manufacturing flow that is both actionable and measurable by design teams." - Michael Buehler-Garcia, Vice President of Marketing, Ponte Solutions

"Pyxis Technology's development of tools for design-for-manufacturability is critical to many of our customers who are working on projects at 65nm and below. We are constantly looking to improve our design flow to meet our customers' design goals while optimizing their design for manufacturability and yield." - Hung Hua, President, Signet Design Solutions, Inc.

"By adding a tight interface between NexusRoute and our Laker products, we've given our leading-edge customers an automated chip-level routing capability to design and integrate complex SoC devices containing both digital and analog functionality. Users get the best of both the custom and semi-custom worlds." - Hau-Yung Chen, CEO, Silicon Canvas Inc.

Pyxis Professional Services Increases Design Yield

The company also announced Pyxis Professional Services, a set of consulting and methodology services to help customers improve the yield on design blocks while assessing the impact of DFM design practices within their design environments. Pyxis Technology has a seasoned team of design, manufacturing and EDA veterans with hundreds of man-years of experience in the design and manufacture of advanced microprocessor and ASIC designs. Pyxis Professional Services leverages this knowledge to help customers maximize IC yield and manufacturability by leveraging DFM in their design environments. Services include:

* NexusYield Design-based Yield Service, consistently delivering 5-10% improvements in predicted yield for sub-100nm design.

* NexusDFM Design Rule Assessment Service, to measure the effectiveness and impact of various DFM process rules on routability, timing, and yield quality-of-results.

* NexusLib Library Assessment Service, to optimize standard cell libraries for better routability and DFM quality-of-results.

Pricing and Availability

NexusRoute and Pyxis Professional Services are available now. NexusRoute pricing starts at $400,000 for a one-year time-based license. Professional Services pricing varies depending upon the statement of work. Contact Pyxis sales at [e-mail] for additional information.

About Pyxis

Pyxis Technology delivers software and services to address the problems that chip designers and foundries face in the physical design, layout, and routing of nanometer-scale integrated circuits (ICs) and systems on a chip (SoCs). Pyxis NexusRoute is a next generation, yield-driven auto-router, architected for process technologies of 65nm and below. Based on open industry standard interfaces and easily integrated into existing design flows, NexusRoute reduces design and manufacturing closure by up to 4X and increases chip yield by as much as 10%. Pyxis Professional Services help customers maximize IC yield and manufacturability by leveraging DFM and yield enhancement approaches within their design environments.

Pyxis has offices in Austin, Texas. For more information, see www.pyxistech.com.

pDfx[R] is a DFM environment available from PDF Solutions, Inc. pDfx is a registered trademark of PDF Solutions, Inc.