Posted: 11/9/98

Artisan Components announced it has beefed up its standard cell and I/O libraries and is offering application-tunable libraries to its Process-Perfect customers.

Artisan has enhanced its Process-Perfect libraries by moving to a new architecture called Sage (Superior Area and Greater Efficiency). The company said Sage produces the industry's smallest standard cell layouts by reducing cell size and improving place-and-route tool efficiency.

The company said the 0.25- and 0.18-micron Sage libraries are 20 percent denser and lower in power than the standard cell libraries offered at those geometries by Artisan, and still provide comparable or better circuit performance.

The Sage architecture also features a cell set of 416 cells, is routable in 3, 4, 5 or more metal layers and has verified tool models for more than 20 EDA tools, the company said.

Artisan also beefed up its Process-Perfect Integral I/O library offering, which uses the company's proprietary electrostatic discharge (ESD) and latch-up structures for high reliability. "Traditionally, we have offered an I/O subset, but with the new release, we now offer a complete feature set that is ideal for systems-on-silicon applications," said Michael Ma, product marketing manager at Artisan.

The company said its Integral I/O library now consists of a rich set of standard I/O functions, with each library designed for a specific process, a user-defined pad pitch, an operating voltage and a voltage-tolerant requirement.

The company also said it will offer customers "tunable libraries" that let customers select the best blend of speed, power and density for their target market. For example, Artisan said, a design team creating portable communications applications may want to trade speed for lower power consumption to get the optimum usage of battery power.

The new application-tunable libraries will be added to the company's Process-Perfect flow, in which Artisan tunes customer libraries for their targeted process.

Core provider VAutomation Inc. (Nashua, N.H.) has released a new Universal Serial Bus (USB) hub controller core. The VUSB-HUB is a USB 1.1-compliant, silicon-proven soft core for implementing a USB hub controller in an ASIC or FPGA.

The company said the core was designed for USB product developers that simultaneously need both USB hub- and target-device capability. The core employs a microprocessor-based architecture, with USB command processing performed by VAutomation-supplied software that executes on an embedded 8-bit RISC microprocessor.

The architecture offers numerous advantages over non-processor-based USB cores, the company said, including a smaller size, increased flexibility, a simple application interface and the ability to support composite USB devices.

VUSB-HUB is priced at $120,00 for a single-project license. The core is offered by VAutomation in Verilog or VHDL formats and comes with a USB 1.1-compliant test bench, synthesis scripts and documentation. VAutomation also offers separately a set of development tools for the core. The tool set includes a C compiler, assembler, software simulator, JTAG-based source-level debugger and development system.

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