CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

24 May 2005

Product News

FlexASIC Broadens Appeal by Adding Magma Blast Create SA Support to Enhance Performance and Design Flexibility

eASIC® Corporation , Magma® Design Automation Inc . and Flextronics Semiconductor announced the availability of the complete Easy eFlow tools suite, incorporating the Blast CreateT SA tool for the FlexASIC product family. The three companies have established a long-term partnership to provide an optimal Structured ASIC product addressing the deep submicron design issues of cost, time to market and performance. FlexASIC devices, manufactured in 0.13-micron CMOS process, are offered by both eASIC and Flextronics Semiconductor. The Easy eFlow tool suite which includes Blast Create SA, is a unified design flow that allows for a fast path to affordable, high performance programmable ASIC designs.

"It is clear that the Structured ASIC Market is now entering boom times," Said Jerry Worchel, Principal Analyst, ASIC/ASSP and Intellectual Property Service Semiconductor Research at In-Stat. "In-Stat's Current projections for the structured ASIC market indicate a 64.5% CAGR between 2004 and 2009, or from a dollar perspective, dollar shipment value will grow at a rapid pace, going from $209.8 million in 2004 to $2,520.9 million by 2009. Included in this category is eASIC's unique via configurable technology, which is as close as one can get to a zero time-to-market approach, at least from the RTL-to-tapeout perspective, as recently announced by STMicroelectronics. The FlexASIC product might take a while for broad-based acceptance to occur, but as design engineers get accustomed to the technology and the advantages it affords, this will become their preferred ASIC design methodology."

The Easy eFlow features a complete, high performance RTL-to-GDSII solution designed specifically for the FlexASIC product with its single via programmable architecture and SRAM based Look Up Tables. Blast Create SA eASIC support includes structure-specific RTL synthesis, direct mapping to chip hierarchy and dedicated resources, and cell clustering and packing. It also features physical synthesis to handle physical site constraints and embedded macros such as variable size memory, automatic assignments to low-skew pre-routed clock and power networks and routing-aware timing-driven placement to provide a fast and predictable path from RTL to structured-ASIC silicon. With this solution, the FlexASIC product allows customers to enjoy very low-cost programmable ASICs with reduced development cycles, using the winning combination of eASIC's innovative patented technology, Flextronics' world-class design and manufacturing service expertise and Magma's state-of-the-art design solutions.

"FlexASICT is a best-in-class solution and addresses the industry needs of ASIC-like performance, a per-unit cost that is a fraction of an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), and improved time to market," said Elli Yaniv, General Manager of the digital business unit of Flextronics Semiconductor. "This allows design engineers to make multiple changes to their designs without costly ASIC reworks."

"eASIC is aimed at providing a comprehensive and affordable programmable ASIC solution, supported by world-class manufacturing services such as Flextronics Semiconductor and state-of-the art design tools, including Magma and other leading EDA vendors," said Ronnie Vasishta, eASIC Executive Vice President of Marketing. "As the customization cost of semiconductor devices has reached an unprecedented high, it is an ideal and fertile environment for a disruptive technology such as eASIC's to emerge. A new era of low-cost platform ASIC and therefore mass customization of IC devices can be made possible with maskless lithography. This will allow advances such as one day turn-around for chip design and a few days turn-around for chip manufacturing with Zero NRE. With these kind of changes the semiconductor industry is once again poised to stimulate innovation. The FlexASIC product embraces this concept and can deliver on the promise of low-cost, mass customization."

"Through our partnership with Flextronics Semiconductor and eASIC, we can meet the demands of designers that want FPGA-like flexibility and fast turnaround, but at a fraction of the cost of traditional ASIC manufacturing," said Kam Kittrell, general manager of Magma's Logic Design Business Unit. "We're very pleased to be able to offer mutual customers a fully customized solution that takes advantage of eASIC's unique structured ASIC architecture. Support for this architecture extends Magma's Unified Platform SynthesisT technology, which provides a single synthesis platform that targets RTL to FPGA, structured ASIC or standard cell platforms and enables physical optimization on all platforms to deliver optimal area and timing results."

Availability

Easy eFlow, including the Magma's Blast Create SA, is currently in limited release. Full production release is scheduled for Q3 2005.

The 0.13 micron FlexASIC product, including 6 members ranging from 250K to 3 Million ASIC gates, with up to 2.8 Mbit RAM, is available for initial customers implementations and will be offered for full production in Q3 2005.

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