Version 3 of Mustang Datapath Design Environment Adds Interactive Controls for High-Performance Design; `What If' Analysis Lets Engineers Quickly Meet Performance Targets.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 7, 1999--

Arcadia Design Systems, Inc., the leader in datapath design, today announced a major upgrade to its popular Mustang(R) datapath design environment. The enhancements made to Version 3 of Mustang make the tool much more useful for high-performance design engineers who design complex DSPs, CPUs, graphics or communications engines. With these enhancements, designers can perform quick "what if" analyses on complex designs, squeezing even more performance out of designs while still employing the timesaving automated features in the Mustang tool. These "what if" analyses can be performed in a matter of minutes with Mustang, while they are virtually impossible to do using hand-crafted custom design techniques.

The enhancements in Version 3 provide more interactive control of this highly automated tool. Now the Mustang datapath design environment lets designers control datapath group construction and placement, adds datapath floorplanning capabilities, adds more placement constraints, and provides ECO (engineering change order) for datapath placement. Mustang version 3 optimizes the placement of complex datapath elements and random logic to minimize signal skew, block size and turn-around time in complex integrated circuit designs. Mustang accepts industry standard Verilog or EDIF netlists and works with place-and-route tools from Avant! and Cadence.

"High-performance designers know their designs very well. The new interactive features in Mustang enable them to visualize their design graphically to better manage and manipulate data bus flow," stated Bill Heiser, Vice President of Marketing at Arcadia Design Systems. "The combination of the interactive features and Mustang's automatic features make Mustang the only choice for users of older generation software like SmartPath and GDT."

New Features Provide More Control and Flexibility

The most important new feature in Mustang Version 3 is interactive datapath group placement and construction. Because of the variety of front-end design methodologies in use today, datapath structures are often difficult to identify automatically from the netlist. The designer now can use a layout window to examine all of the automatically extracted datapath groups and incrementally extract datapath groups that the automatic tool might have missed. Placement control is available by individual bits, by bit slice, by bit slice groups in arrays, and where there can be empty bits, sharing bits, flipped bits, special alignments or interleaving. Associated control logic can be automatically extracted, then interactively evaluated and controlled by the designer.

Mustang Version 3 includes much better communication with floorplanners using DEF files. At the beginning of the design process, Mustang can load the DEF file to use the floorplanning input. Then, after optimizing the datapath placements, Mustang can pass row planning, track planning, and power/clock/special net planning to a floorplanner, enhancing the results when the physical design is completed using Avant! or Cadence place-and-route tools.

Additional placement constraints let the designs have even more control over the layout. Mustang Version 3 supports all or partial pin order constraints and multiple regions for control logic, while documenting all changes with placement ECOs.

Datapaths Impact Chip Speed

All chips used for data processing utilize datapaths. Typically, for maximum performance, engineers handcraft the physical placement of datapaths in their chips. However, handcrafting a complex datapath design can take months of the most experienced designer's time. Mustang provides a viable alternative to the time-consuming handcrafted placements of datapath structures. With Mustang, engineers can get results that are very close to handcrafted designs, and over a 50 percent improvement over cell-based designs that are placed using industry-standard place-and-route tools.

Pricing and Availability

Mustang Version 3 is shipping now and is priced at $100,000.

Arcadia Design Systems provides tools and design services for high-performance datapath-intensive designs. Visit Arcadia Design Systems at www.ArcadiaDesign.com

Note to Editors: Mustang is a registered trademark of Arcadia Design Systems, Inc.