ASTC, Tanner EDA to deliver ASIC design services

PARIS -- Australian Semiconductor Technology Co (ASTC Pty Ltd) and Tanner EDA (Monrovia, Calif) announced they have concluded a collaborative agreement to deliver analog/mixed signal IP and custom ASIC design services.

ATSC said it has invested in IP enablement and infrastructure readiness with Tanner EDA tools and flows to provide low cost analog/mixed signal ASIC design services and solutions to its global ASIC customers.

In a discussion with EE Times, John S Zuk, vice president, marketing and business strategy, Tanner EDA, specified that ASTC teams will be utilizing the complete Tanner EDA tool suite -- matching the appropriate tool set to the design requirements. He noted: "The tool flow being utilized in our seminal project is HiPer Silicon A/MS -- Tanner EDA's full flow analog and mixed signal design suite. We anticipate additional opportunities to leverage Tanner EDA's MEMS tools, as well."

Tanner EDA HiPer Silicon
HiPer Silicon A/MS is a cohesive A/MS flow that bridges analog and digital verification and adds synthesis, static timing, and place and route.

Zuk explained that ASTC considered several EDA tool vendors but selected Tanner EDA for various reasons: Comprehensive and cohesive tool suite that focuses on analog, mixed-signal and MEMS; price-performance and mix of licensing options that meet the needs of their diverse project requirements; and Tanner's commitment and attention to customer service.

"Tanner EDA tools, flows and partnership enable the ASTC A/MS Design Services operation to offer new, lower cost, design solutions to a new range of global customers and ASIC segments," Jay Yantchev, CEO of ASTC, said in a statement. "Previously cost-prohibitive A/MS ASIC product ideas have now become feasible and profitable propositions both for our customers and for ASTC A/MS design services."

Zuk confirmed that this is the first collaboration between Tanner EDA and ASTC but, he said, "[it's] already off to a strong start!"

ASTC is a semiconductor design, software, and services company serving the global suppliers and customers of embedded semiconductors. ASTC commenced operations in March 2006 and employs around 100 staff worldwide with headquarters in Adelaide, an engineering center in the Chicago area, an office in Austin, Texas, and in Japan.

In 2011, ASTC spun out a new company VWorks that intends to provide new technology and business solutions for electronic system level (ESL) development, modeling, simulation, and virtual prototyping to customers in the industries for aerospace, automotive, transportation, communications, and multimedia embedded electronics and software.

VWorks has a family of products that include VLAB, their primary design platform, Genesis a tool for model creation and OSCAR, a built from the ground up OSCI compliant simulator that they claim can do more and run faster than the reference implementation used by most suppliers of SystemC.

VWorks said it will demonstrate how virtual prototyping can accelerate embedded software and systems development at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2012, in the ARM Community booth.

This story was originally posted by EE Times.