Simplex Ships Fire & Ice, Thunder & Lightning, The EDA Industry's First Full-Chip Signal and Power Compliance Suite; Tools Deliver Full-Chip Visibility on Multi-Million Transistor ICs to Solve SI and IR Drop Problems and Ensure "Tapeout Confidence".

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 9, 1996--Simplex Solutions, Inc. today announced that it is now shipping Fire & Ice and Thunder & Lightning, the electronic design automation (EDA) industry's first fully integrated suite of IC layout verification products targeted for signal and power compliance (SPC) of multi-million transistor chips in deep submicron semiconductor process technology.

Fire & Ice and Thunder & Lightning enable designers of complex ICs, ASICs, and ASSPs to easily adopt an SPC methodology that thoroughly ensures working silicon prior to manufacturing.

"After receiving tremendous customer response and encouragement at the Design Automation Conference in June, we are very pleased to be shipping the production version of our tools," said Penny Herscher, president and CEO of Simplex. "Demand for a new physical verification methodology is increasing as designers begin to hit the wall applying only the LVS/DRC-based approach to deep submicron technology. It's a risky and often costly proposition to tape out these designs with a wave of the hand or by checking just a few critical nets using post-layout static timing analysis. Our products uncover the critical, full-chip power and signal integrity problems caused by interconnect dominance that simply can't be found using traditional verification tools and methods. With Fire & Ice and Thunder Lightning, designers can rest assured that their designs will work right the first time."

New Level of Visibility Into SI and IR Drop Problems

Enabled by the capacity and accuracy of Fire & Ice's full-chip 3D interconnect extraction, IC designers are using Thunder & Lightning to gain greater visibility into very difficult problems with signal integrity (SI) and IR drop. Thunder & Lightning feature a full-chip display mode that combines fast problem observation with the capability to scope in and make corrections. The resulting full-chip visibility gives designers clear insight into both the regional and global effects of SI and IR drop, and allows them to minimize the overall impact on chip timing and performance.

"Time to market, performance, and reliability are critical issues for us," said Mike Leary, director of circuit design at Chromatic Research, the leader in media processor technology. "We selected Simplex' version 1.0 full-chip verification methodology in order to identify power distribution and reliability issues before first silicon."

In another customer case, Simplex' tools have completed full-chip 3D capacitance extraction on a 1.7 million transistor design in 24 hours on 10 workstations. They finished analysis for dynamic IR drop in 16 hours on a power distribution net of 2 million resistors and identified a product failure that required silicon redesign. Both the extraction and analysis run times scale as the design size increases.

Pricing and Platform Support

Simplex' integrated SPC tool suite is available immediately running on UNIX workstations from Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, and later in Q4 on IBM workstations. Pricing for the Simplex SPC suite starts at $150,000 U.S. list.

Simplex Solutions, Inc. is a privately held, electronic design automation (EDA) company pioneering the new market for deep submicron full-chip verification. The company's Fire & Ice and Thunder & Lightning products provide the EDA industry's first fully integrated solution for IC signal and power verification. The tools feature unique 3-D extraction, interconnect modeling, and analysis capabilities that enable designers to perform post-layout signal and power compliance (SPC) tests which are essential to the final tape-out process for high-performance microprocessors, ASICs, and ASSPs. The tools are readily incorporated into EDA industry-standard, timing-driven design flows and tool environments. -0-

Note to Editors: Fire & Ice and Thunder & Lightning are trademarks of Simplex Solutions, Inc. GDS II is a trademark of Cadence.

CONTACT: Simplex Solutions

Kevin Walsh, 408/432-8260

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Scott Seiden, 415/637-8212