Anaheim, Calif. - Cadence Design Systems Inc. and Applied Materials Inc. said last week that they have successfully built 90-nanometer test silicon featuring Cadence's X Architecture, the diagonal interconnect the company has touted as the wave of the future in chip design.

The test proves that current fab equipment can create an X Architecture chip, executives from the two companies said at the Design Automation Conference here.

The X Architecture supports the 45 degrees routing of traces on silicon chips in addition to conventional 90 degrees routing, promising smaller and faster chips with less interconnect than current designs. Skeptics have questioned the architecture's practicality and wondered whether it will require both a complete revamping of design tools and a new generation of fab equipment.

John Madok, director of strategic planning and new business development at Applied Materials, said Applied's mini-fab in Santa Clara, Calif., created to test new processes, implemented the 45 degrees traces without problems. No unexpected or odd signal-integrity issues cropped up, he said.

No revamping

Showing attendees slides of an X Architecture layout, Madok said, "What we found is that the mask-writing tool could handle this architecture. People were unsure if [the tool] would go so slow that it would be out of control. That's not the case; you can make the masks."

Madok said Applied Materials has proven that optical proximity correction techniques can be applied and that current polishing and test equipment can handle the X Architecture.

Meanwhile, Cadence is still developing tools targeted at supporting designers' work with diagonal interconnects.

The X Architecture's development has been making steady progress. In February 2002, Toshiba Corp. announced it had successfully laid out a 200-MHz RISC processor with the diagonal interconnects.

Other semiconductor companies participating in the so-called X Initiative in support of the architecture include Dai Nippon Printing, DuPont Photomask, Etec Systems, KLA-Tencor and Toshiba Machines. The X Initiative was jointly started by Toshiba and Simplex Solutions before the latter company was acquired last year by Cadence.

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