Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Monterey Design Systems | Subject: Canon
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 06 June 2002
SDPD solution pays off with tape-outs
for Canon
Canon has taped out its first two designs with the Monterey System-Driven Physical Design (SDPD) solution.
Canon has taped out its first two designs with the Monterey System-Driven Physical Design (SDPD) solution The two mixed-signal designs were taped out less than six months after initial installation of Monterey products
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 4 May 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Monterey Design Systems describes System-Driven Physical Design as the first design methodology to enable physical chip implementation from system to GDSII tapeout of SoCs up to 100 million gates.
First silicon has been fabricated and passed functional tests on the first attempt.
"We finally selected Monterey over offerings from other EDA vendors because we needed to go into production very quickly", said Hiroyuki Nakamura of Canon's Ayase site.
"We believed that Monterey would give us the shortest ramp-up time.
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These two tape-outs are proof positive that we made the correct choice.
We could not have achieved this with any other EDA vendor".
The two designs contain a significant amount of analogue circuitry 10% of one chip and 25% of the other.
The designs posed a number of challenges: high percentage of analogue content, requirement to take advantage of useful clock skew, and some very specialised routing requirements that are peculiar to mixed signal circuits.
Canon evaluated a number of EDA solutions and came to the conclusion that, unlike others that were effectively tool sets that required a significant amount of scripting and integration work, Monterey SDPD is as close to a turnkey solution as they would find and would take the least amount of time and effort to put into production use.
Canon could ill-afford to devote an army of highly skilled engineers to developing, maintaining, and executing a physical design flow.
The company needed a solution that was easy to learn, easy to use, and required minimal internal EDA support.
Monterey satisfied all these requirements, enabling Canon to complete their designs on a very tight schedule.
Monterey and Soliton Systems, Monterey's distributor in Japan, worked very closely with Canon over a three-month period to develop the flow, which included reading in Canon specific libraries.
Canon was able to benefit not only from Monterey's and Soliton's expertise with the Monterey solution, but also their overall experience with physical design methodologies including the critical element of library validation.
"From the very beginning, we saw that Canon's requirements were in close alignment with the strengths of Monterey's solution", said Rick Ader, General Manager of Asia/Pacific Operations at Monterey.
"Prior to this, Canon did not have an in-house physical design flow and they could not afford to spend time and money purchasing and learning to use several different point tools.
Monterey offered them exactly what they needed, a complete, tightly integrated, easy-to-use netlist-to-GDSII solution".
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