CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
14 September 2004
Product News
Mentor Graphics Announces OASIS Stream File Format Ready for Production, 10X-50X File Size Reduction Benefit Confirmed
Mentor Graphics Corporation announced that the Calibre® product line is accepting OASIS files and supporting OASIS output in the upcoming 2004.3 production release scheduled for September 2004. It includes the GDS-to-OASIS translator, which was previously made publicly available for validation and verification of the new format.
Beta test partners, selected from among the world's major semiconductor developers, foundries and mask manufacturers, translated thousands of files, proving overall flow efficiency and confirming a file size reduction of 10X to 50X.
To date, Mentor has provided more than 160 downloads of the GDS-to-OASIS translation utility, which is available free of charge at http://www.mentor.com/calibre , and is generally used as a reference for OASIS-related development activities in the industry. Now that the tool is production proven, the OASIS translator will be an included feature in the Calibre releases, available to all Calibre customers.
"We delivered on a new technology that not only benefits the Calibre customers but the industry as a whole," said Joe Sawicki, vice president and general manager, Design to Silicon Division, Mentor Graphics. "With OASIS we now have a platform enabling us to put in place a robust, value-added connection between design and manufacturing."
OASIS was created in response to the need for more efficient handling of growing data volumes and is designed to replace the current GDS format. This new encapsulated format offers substantial improvements in data volume efficiency, up to 50X reduction in hierarchical data volume compared to GDSII, and 2X and more reduction in flat data volume compared to mask writing formats. OASIS is expected to become the new standard for data exchange between design teams, wafer manufacturers and mask suppliers, offering a new bandwidth in information exchange along with the most efficient data representation. OASIS will be a crucial link in future design-for-manufacture applications.
Mentor Graphics was involved in the development of OASIS from the inception, donating the initial framework of the specification, serving for many months as editor of the draft specification, then developing and contributing the translator utility. Mentor's engineers have published several research papers on OASIS; papers can be downloaded from the Mentor Web site at http://www.mentor.com/dsm/techpapers
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