Monterey says it has improved run-times for the Sonar and Dolphin physical-design tools by a factor of two with no penalty in the quality of results. For the recently announced Linux port, Sonar and Dolphin are said to run five times faster than the previous release.

Also, both Sonar and Dolphin 2.5 claim improvements in circuit performance of 10 to 15 percent by incorporating new physical-synthesis and placement algorithms. Memory utilization has been doubled, increasing the flat capacity beyond 5 million gates, the company said.

Also new with Sonar and Dolphin are support for flip-chip packaging technology, parasitic extraction that correlates more closely to 3-D field solvers and the ability to restrict engineering change orders to metal layers without changing the underlying polysilicon or diffusion layers.

For its part, IC Wizard 2.5, Monterey's design-planning tool, has been enhanced to support unclustered standard cells at the top level.

Release 2.5 versions of all the Monterey products are available now. One-year licenses start at $148,000 for IC Wizard, $105,000 for Sonar and $400,000 for Dolphin.