Help with ATi Press Release!

[Akaz1976]

<< Physical Verification Solution

WILSONVILLE, Ore., Nov. 20 /PRNewswire/ --
Mentor Graphics Corporation (Nasdaq: MENT), today announced that
ATI Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATYT; Toronto: ATY), the world leader in
3D graphics/video acceleration and multimedia solutions, has selected the
Mentor Graphics(R) physical verification and sub-wavelength tool suite,
Calibre(TM), for its next generation, high-performance multimedia chips.
&quot;As traditional flat verification tools could not meet our time-to-market
goals, we chose Calibre to rapidly verify complex ASIC and SoC
(System on Chip) designs,&quot; said Rajesh Verma, Director, IC
(Integrated Circuit) Development, ATI Technologies. &quot;On our advanced designs,
incorporating more than 30 million transistors, LVS (Layout versus Schematic)
was a particular problem. Calibre ran smoothly from day one, and provided us
with a 10X performance advantage in LVS.&quot;
&quot;Calibre's ease of use and Mentor's support also reduced our time to
market,&quot; said Dr. Oscar Law, Staff Engineer, ATI Technologies. &quot;Calibre makes
LVS set-up easy, allowing very flexible texting methodologies. Calibre's
graphical results viewing and debug environment integrates with our existing
layout tool, keeping our engineer's productivity high even during our
transition process. Finally, Mentor's support is excellent. Their close
foundry relationships ensure we have rule files for even the most advanced
processes. We are happy to see that Mentor and the foundries are actively
committed to keeping these rule files current. This is support we can rely
on.&quot;
&quot;ATI typifies the trend we see toward Calibre in the fabless semiconductor
industry,&quot; said Anthony Nicoli, Marketing Manager for Calibre. &quot;Not only do
all three top pure-play foundries, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing,
TSMC, and UMC, use Calibre, but during the last 18 months, the number of
fabless semiconductor companies using Calibre has increased by more than three
times. Calibre is providing the most effective physical verification
infrastructure for the industry.&quot;

Calibre Physical Verification and Sub-Wavelength Tools
Calibre is the industry's only complete physical verification and
sub-wavelength solution. The Calibre physical verification tool suite,
Calibre DRC and Calibre LVS, ensures that IC physical designs conform to
foundry manufacturing rules and match the intended functionality of the chip.
For sub-wavelength designs, Calibre leverages its hierarchical verification
engine to provide a tool suite to add, model and verify layouts for all four
resolution enhancement technology (RET) techniques: optical &amp; process
correction (OPC); phase-shift mask (PSM); Scattering Bars (SB) and off-axis
illumination. As the market leader in physical verification tools, Calibre is
the standard for the majority of the world's largest integrated device
manufacturers, foundries and deep submicron library providers.

>>



Could some pls tell me what this about? or whether even if this news is important.

Akaz

 

[pm]

It's basically an announcement of a customer win for Mentor - a company who provides software for making chips. Apparently (reading from the 1st paragraph) ATI was having a problem comparing the drawn mask (layout) to the schematics. This is not a trivial problem and I can see it being an issue but I'm surprised that they are having a problem at this late in the game - it's not like this problem is dramatically different at 0.18um than it was at 1um. I wonder what they changed that made this a difficult problem... <pm ponders this>

Anyway, it's really a press release for Mentor - not ATI. And as far as the ATI customer is concerned it means nothing more than the fact that they have adjusted their chip development software suite slightly. No big deal.

Edit: ok, I think I can see where the problem came up. It's probably the way that they were doing optical correction for phase shifted masks and they were having problems determining if the schematic sizes were actually matching with the poly length/width dimensions from the corrected masks. Not that this is part of the question, but I thought someone else might be wondering too.