Jul 31 2010
Synopsys Inc, a front runner in IP (Internet Protocol) and Software used in designing, validating and manufacturing semiconductors, declared that Foveon Inc, a leading developer of image capture systems and sensors, have built their latest next generation direct image sensor called Foveon X3 direct image sensor, by utilizing Synopsys’ Galaxy Custom Designer Solutions.
This image sensor is employed in top-of-the-line consumer cameras such as Sigma’s SD15 digital SLR that has more than 14 million pixels and is enabled or fixed on a180-nanometer (nm) CMOS die. The main purpose of choosing Synopsys’ design was to hasten up, the Time-to-Tapeout as its open environment supplied a quick, minimum-risk route to trek from its current solution and terminate tapeout in less than 60 days.
Foveon’s Vice President and General Manager, Andrew Cole, stated that, Synopsys has proffered superior productivity, which is to be made use of, in Foveon’s immense, complicated designs, and that the open standard environment helped in implementing relocation in a simple way without any major changes to their design schedules.
The time taken, for the change to custom Designer and then tape out was less than 2 months, which included devising an interoperable process design kit (iPDK), corroborating layout with the existing design database, and complete pseudo netlist simulation, to authenticate the migrated schematic’s accuracy. The trendy architecture used in custom designer has hastened the deployment of Foveon sensor, by permitting the designers to use its slick user interface and advanced layout properties.
According to Bijan Kiani, Vice President, Product Marketing, Synopsis, Custom Designer’s exhaustive solutions helps in increasing productivity and speeds up the time-to-tape out attribute. Also its open standards based environment assists in creating non-proprietary and increased productive solutions.
The simulation and front end section comprises of a HSPICE Circuit Simulator, Custom Wave View Waveform Analyzer, CustomSim FastSPICE Simulator and a Custom Designer Schematic Editor (SE) that comes with a simulation and analysis environment; while tools such as IC Validator Physical Verification tool, StarRC parasitic extraction tool and Custom Designer Layout Editor (LE) with SmartDRD design rule-driven technology and schematic-driven Layout (SDL) are a part of Synopsys custom physical design and verification flow.
Source: http://www.synopsys.com/