Out in Front: March 1, 1996

QuickPort is a new EDA tool from Aspec Technology that, working on a layout database in the company's High-Density Architecture (HDA), transfers a digital chip's physical design from one CMOS technology to another. You may need to move a design to a new process due to foundry-capacity limitations or to take advantage of a new technology for cost or performance reasons. Aspec guarantees the new database to be 100% functionally correct when compared to the original database. After porting, you can perform timing and other verification steps on the design in the new process implementation.

HDA supports more than 25 CMOS gate-array, standard-cell, and embedded-array processes from more than 12 vendors, spanning technologies ranging from 0.35 to 0.8 µm and with as many as five layers of metal interconnect. Aspec claims a power-dissipation decrease of 50% for libraries designed in HDA over comparable competitors' libraries. The company also claims that HDA yields as much as 40 and 30% better gate-array and standard-cell-density, respectively, than competing library products. HDA libraries have a fine-grained architecture, share V_DD and V_SS lines, and are fully symmetric in both the vertical and horizontal directions. These attributes simplify process porting. QuickPort performs a nonlinear transformation of the design rules from the original to the target process and replaces existing cells with new cells for the target process. The tool preserves relative placement of all cells and accurately transforms wire connections between cells to create the new database.

You can use QuickPort, which runs on Sun and Hewlett-Packard platforms, only on chips designed with Aspec's HDA libraries. The tool currently supports Cadence and Silicon Valley Research layout databases and will support databases from Mentor Graphics in the third quarter. QuickPort will be available in the second quarter at prices starting at $100,000.
—by Jim Lipman

Aspec Technology, Sunnyvale, CA. (408) 774-2199.