News and New Products

Tool analyzes ICs

By Michael Santarini -- EDN, 6/24/2005

Giga Scale Integration claims that its new IC-economic-analysis tool can help you figure out whether a foundry’s less expensive, standard 90-nm process or even its 130-nm process will meet your design requirements just as well as the same foundry’s pricier, low-power, 90-nm process. The technology expands on the company’s InCyte chip-estimation tool, which allows users to derive an IC specification with estimates on die size, power, performance, and leakage. The company has now taken the estimation technology a step further by creating an economic analysis add-on engine to InCyte that allows users to turn their design specification into an IC budgetary quotation and figure out the best foundry and fabric for their next design project.

Adam Traidman, Giga Scale IC’s president and chief executive officer, says that the company gathered silicon-wafer-pricing and defect-density data from foundries and trade groups, package-pricing data from packages, and test- and assembly-cost data from various vendors. The InCyte economic engine’s database stores that data. “We take the output of our InCyte tool, which provides technical chip estimation for die size, power consumption, and number of pins, and combine that data with the new economic data to produce this final packaged-chip cost,” says Traidman.

The engine also has a life-cycle-analysis feature that allows designers to forecast and account for mask re-spins, increasing yields, and decreasing wafer and package costs. Traidman says that Giga Scale will eventually improve the tool to allow users to analyze whether they should implement their designs in FPGAs, structured ASICs, or traditional cell-based ASIC fabrics. The economic engine is available as a $2000 upgrade to InCyte. InCyte is available as a free download at www.chipestimate.com.

Giga Scale Integration, www.gigaic.com.