CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
09 May 2005
Implementation Investments
Ricoh Tapes Out 90nm Chip Early with Cadence Encounter RTL Compiler; Cadence Patented Global Synthesis Enables Top-Down Approach to Greatly Improve Productivity from Weeks to Days
Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced that Ricoh Company, Ltd. has successfully taped out a 3-million-gate chip ahead of schedule and with reduced gate count using the Cadence® EncounterT digital IC design platform, including RTL Compiler synthesis.
Encounter RTL Compiler delivered production-cost savings through reduced run time and by avoiding extra manual efforts at block-level integration on an important networking-processor design.
"Ricoh is a diversified office automation equipment and electronics provider doing advanced IC designs for complex applications," said Kenji Wakabayashi, general manager, Imaging System LSI Development Center, Electronic Devices Company, at Ricoh. "The top-down synthesis approach enabled us to quickly and easily fix our scripts for the 3-million-gate design within two days, which we had expected to have taken two weeks. Since time to market is important for us, Encounter RTL Compiler synthesis will help make us more competitive."
The technical support and guidance Cadence supplied throughout the evaluation and design process, combined with Encounter RTL Compiler's capacity and performance advantages, helped Ricoh complete the design, meeting design-speed, area, and power goals, well ahead of schedule. Encounter RTL Compiler's global optimization was also key in Ricoh's ability to reduce logic-gate count.
Nanometer designs include inherent physical effects that need to be measured for area, power, speed and test. The metrics of a design's physical characteristics for performance, area and power with wires requires what Cadence calls quality of silicon (QoS). With Encounter RTL Compiler, designers are enabled by unique global-focus synthesis technologies to achieve high QoS in less time and with less effort.
"This newest successful RTL Compiler tapeout of the Ricoh chip is yet another proof point of how the Encounter synthesis can efficiently meet design challenges," said Dr. Chi-Ping Hsu, corporate vice president at Cadence. "Encounter RTL Compiler is now being successfully used in production by systems companies throughout the world to achieve the fastest path to the highest QoS."
During the last four quarters, 75 new customers adopted Encounter RTL Compiler.
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