Celestry Introduces CellXpert-CN

The manufacturer says . . .

Murray Disman says . . .

Celestry Introduces Cell-Noise Characterization Software, Socle Selects Celestry for Sign-Off, Nautilus-SI and CellXpert-CN Pair Up for Accurate Signal Integrity Sign-Off SAN JOSE, Calif.--April 8, 2002--Celestry Design Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of Silicon Accurate Sign-Off technology for the semiconductor and electronics industry, announced that it is shipping the first member of its cell-noise characterization family of products—CellXpert-CN. In addition, Celestry announced that Socle Technology Corp. (Hsin-Chu, Taiwan), a TSMC Design Center Alliance company, has selected CellXpert-CN for cell-noise characterization and Celestry's Nautilus-SI for signal integrity sign-off by Socle's RTL2Silicon service. CellXpert-CN eliminates cell-noise library characterization iterations by using an algorithm that reduces the effort to a single pass. It also reduces the amount of false errors during signal-integrity analysis, and speeds design debug to increase productivity. "After a detailed evaluation of Nautilus-SI and CellXpert-CN's cell-library noise characterization, we found the methodology fits well with our SoC-ImP technology, and gives us the best solution for our cell-based signal-integrity analysis sign-off," remarked David Lyou, Socle's general manager. Lyou added, "Compared with other cell-library noise characterization methodologies, we found that CellXpert-CN offers a higher level of accuracy by taking into account the transition time and capacitive loading information found in our timing library. Nautilus-SI, with its cell-noise library, gives our designers an accurate signal-integrity tool for analyzing the effects of delay change and noise due to coupling without going through the full dynamic transistor-level analysis process. Working closely with Celestry's team, we have implemented this new methodology in our deep-submicron design flow for signal integrity sign-off from the RTL." Zhihong Liu, president and CEO of Celestry noted, "As part of our Silicon-Accurate Sign-Off efforts, CellXpert-CN is the first product in our noise-characterization family. Later this year, we will introduce more noise-characterization products for intellectual property, memory, and analog mixed-signal designs." More About CellXpert-CN CellXpert-CN provides noise characterization for standard cells as well as I/O cells, and supports combinational, sequential, and tri-state logic cells. The inputs to CellXpert-CN are SPICE model parameters, cell library-timing data in Synopsys (.lib) or Cadence (.tlf) format, and SPICE/CDL circuit net lists with RC information. The output of CellXpert-CN is a noise library file (.nlib). Price and Availability Celestry's CellXpert-CN with Nautilus-SI is available now. Nautilus-SI with CellXpert-CN starts at $115,000 for a time-based license (TBL). The software runs on Sun Solaris.

CellXpert-CN is part of Celestry's Nautilus-SI signal-integrity tool set. Nautilus-SI is claimed to be the industry's first full-chip signal-integrity verification solution for multi-million cell designs. The tool incorporates 3D parasitic extraction technology to determine the coupling capacitance, and then determines the coupling effects on timing and identifies signal-integrity problems due to coupling noise. The company recently qualified three tools for TSMC's 0.13 µm process. The tools include the RelPro+ and RelXpert products for Hot Carrier Injection (HCI) effects, and the AnalogXpert product for device mismatch simulation analysis for TSMC's analog/mixed-signal process technologies. Celestry continues to push into the physical-effects arena with its tools. Physical effects grow in significance as the feature size is reduced, and can result from the use of copper, more metal layers, and thinner gate insulators. The push to the 90 nm process node will not only increase the impact of physical effects covered with current EDA tools, but will introduce new effects that will require modeling and analysis.

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