Sierra Design Automation
In June 2007, Mentor Graphics acquired Sierra Design Automation (Santa Clara, Calif.) and its entire product line, including the Pinnacle adaptive variability engine and the Olympus-SOC next-generation place and route system that concurrently addresses variations in lithography, process corners and design modes.
The acquisition of Sierra expands Mentor’s leadership in DFM (design-for-manufacturing), and provides integration that customers need between physical design and back-end verification and yield-enhancement. The combination of Sierra’s Place and Route and Mentor’s Physical Verification and DFM tools provides a design-to-fab flow capable of handling dozens of process corners and multiple modes, all while addressing manufacturability challenges to achieve manufacturing closure of customers’ designs.
“At 65 and 45 nanometers (nm), discontinuities such as process variation, design size, low power, and DFM are creating a major disruption in physical design,” said Pravin Madhani, president and CEO, Sierra Design Automation. The combination of Sierra and Mentor tools provides a powerful design-to-fab flow that addresses these discontinuities in a comprehensive fashion.”
Mentor Graphics will continue to sell and support Sierra’s products through its global sales and support organizations.
Olympus-S0C
The Olympus-SoC solution delivers innovative technologies for 65 and 45 nm processes. It provides a next-generation place-and-route system that concurrently addresses variations in lithography, process corners, and design modes. Integral to Olympus-SoC is a detailed routing architecture that embeds variation-aware timing optimization with litho-modeling early in the design cycle, ensuring faster timing closure for complex process rules. Olympus-SoC is capable of simultaneously solving for dozens of different process corners and design modes, ensuring an optimized chip without unnecessary guard banding.
Pinnacle
The Pinnacle suite provides the fastest and the best design-for-variability implementation solution. Built on an advanced architecture, the Pinnacle design-for-variability (DFV) engine handles extremely large designs, and plugs seamlessly into existing design flows. The Rapid Physical Feasibility features help engineers in the early design phase to refine and finalize the floor plan and respond to complex design constraints.