SAN FRANCISCO — Avant! Corp. (Fremont, Calif.) is heading to the Design Automation Conference this week with a slew of significant products, including the new Columbia shape-based router for IC design; the Mars-Xtalk up-front analysis tool to drive Apollo place and route; the Taurus-OPC system for up-front optical proximity correction; the Taurus-Process and Taurus Device 3-D TCAD simulation tools; and the upgraded Star-Hspice, boasting new multithreading capabilities that improve simulation speeds by 300 percent over the previous version of the tool.

Chi-Ping Hsu, chief executive officer, staff, products and technology for Avant! Corp., said the new tools address the difficulties of characterizing new processes and silicon modeling in the face of ever-shrinking process geometries, and of the timing and noise issues that hinder design productivity.

At the top of the new releases from Avant! is the Columbia hierarchical connectivity-driven, variable-space, variable-width, shape-based router. Hsu said the tool, targeted for layout designers, is for semicustom system-on-a-chip hierarchical design in which cores, analog and semicustom blocks, and standard cells are assembled on the same design. Hsu said hierarchy is the key to the router. "Traditionally, people think they have one level [of] hierarchy to edit," said Hsu. "You have to be able to edit hierarchy in context; you have to be able to look across the hierarchy boundaries to be efficient."

In the Avant! scheme of things, designers use the Panet-RTL design planning and Planet-PL floor-planning tool to do the hierarchy planning and feed it into the router. The shape-based router features design editing with interactive design-rule checking, an edit-in-place capability, interactive floor-plan adjustment, automatic point-to-point route, and interactive route editing. "Columbia is an adaptive routing and editing environment," said Hsu. "The adaptive portion looks ahead and automatically does a shape-based path search while it is doing the editing." The tool links to other Avant! tools via the Milkyway database. It is available immediately. Hsu said pricing has not been decided, but believes the high-end package will be $95,000.

Avant! will also preview its Mars-Xtalk tool at the show. Hsu said the new Mars-Xtalk brings noise analysis up front to drive physical design. Mars-Xtalk works on the same philosophy as the Mars-Rail power-driven placement and analysis tool Avant! introduced in January.

"Mars-Xtalk will automatically analyze every signal to determine if signals are becoming critical in terms of crosstalk," said Hsu. "It will drive the router to avoid crosstalk while it is doing routing optimization." Using the tool, designers set rules for the width and height of the coupling noise, run the analysis and then the tool creates rules for the router. Hsu said the tool will not be available until Q3 of this year and pricing has not yet been determined.

Avant! will show the new Taurus-OPC and the TCAD to ECAD linking framework, called Computer Automated Semiconductor Tooling (CAST), which links Taurus to other ECAD and TCAD solutions from Avant!.

Taurus-OPC is derived from the Proteus technology Avant! obtained in its acquisition of Technology Modeling Associates. With Taurus-OPC, Avant! has brought optical-proximity correction up into the design phase to cut iterative loops and speed up overall design time. "This is targeted at the IC designers, because now they have to worry about silicon behavior," said Hsu. "By using Taurus-OPC, they can find out what exactly is going to happen in silicon." Hsu said that using the tool's layout editor, designers can load a DRAM cell, push a button to get the electrical behavior and the three-dimensional geometry of the cell and then immediately run parasitic extraction. The CAST system ties Taurus-OPC with the Hercules design-rule checking tool and two new TCAD simulators, Taurus-Process and Taurus-Device.

The two new TCAD simulators are billed as the first three-dimensional TCAD process and device tools. Targeting process engineers, the tools predict advanced wafer-processing steps and the structural and electrical characteristics of the device. Hsu said Taurus-Process allows engineers to simulate a complete process flow including implantation, oxidation, diffusion, silicidation, deposition and etch. Engineers can then use Taurus-Process to simulate the structure's electrical characteristics. Hsu also said that the simulators can be linked with Taurus-OPC and Hercules via the CAST to provide an integrated approach to synthesizing mask-pattern layout from electronic-design layout. Taurus-OPC runs on Unix and starts at $250,000. The combination of Taurus-Process and Taurus-Device starts at $70,000 and will be available in July of this year. CAST is provided at no cost with a purchase of any of the four tools.

Faster simulation
Last, Avant! will launch a new version of its Star-Hspice simulator, featuring new multi-threading capabilities for faster simulation.

Hsu said that the new multithreading capabilities can increase the tool's speed by 300 percent over its previous version. Multithreading uses shared memory and multiple CPUs to increase execution performance. Hsu said the new version also features improved model accuracy, and its model-evaluation capability has been increased by 25 percent to 30 percent.

It also has a faster and more accurate W-element Transmission Line Model, a new VBIC bipolar transistor model, a consolidated common model interface linking it to Star-Sim and Star-Time, improved charge and junction models, and a Turbo Cell speed-up option. The upgrade with the multithreading capability will be available as part of the 1998.2 release, scheduled for release later this month.