Mentor Graphics Corporation
(NASDAQ: MENT) today announced that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
(TSMC) selected the Calibre® physical verification platform for its Integrated
Sign-Off (ISO) Flow, which integrates tools, setup files, and flow management
utilities to provide mutual customers with an automated design solution for
implementing their chips in TSMC technologies. The new flow is now available
for 65nm designs with planned extensions into other process technology nodes.
According to ST Juang, senior director of Design Infrastructure Marketing at
TSMC, "Integrated Sign-Off Flow leverages our close partnership with eco-system
partners to provide customers with a proven path to targeted TSMC silicon process.
We include key physical verification tools from the Calibre platform in the
flow, which we use ourselves for advanced designs and are now making available
for our customers."
Design companies face the critical challenge of allocating scarce internal
resources to validate libraries, EDA tools and design flows for each specific
process node, resulting in potential delays in getting designs released to production.
Recognizing the importance and need for production-quality design flows, TSMC
and Mentor are addressing this issue by providing design flows that seamlessly
integrate Mentor’s Calibre nmDRC and Calibre nmLVS products for design
rule and layout vs. schematic checking. The Calibre platform provides high performance
and scalability to reduce turnaround time for the most advanced SoC designs
at 65nm and beyond.
"As a close partner with TSMC, we see substantial benefits for our mutual
customers by providing a complete design flow, which includes Mentor’s
sign-off technologies to help achieve faster turnaround, lower overall design
cost, and improved manufacturability," said Joseph Sawicki, vice president
and general manager for the Design-to-Silicon division at Mentor Graphics.