Pulsic expands commitment to interoperability in custom design tools

Company joins IPL Alliance to help drive standards for custom design

SAN JOSE, CALIF., May 13, 2010 — Pulsic today announced a number of new efforts aimed at increasing interoperability in custom design automation (CDA®). To actively drive the development of more industry standards directly applicable to the custom design segment, Pulsic has become a contributing member in the IPL Alliance. Pulsic is also working with leading EDA companies to advance its own interoperability through SpringSoft’s Harmony partner program and Synopsys’s in-Sync program. In addition, working closely with customers, Pulsic will implement new customer-specific reference design kits for flow and regression testing.

In custom design, hand-crafted quality remains the top priority. But as the semiconductor industry moves toward advanced manufacturing process nodes of 45nm and below, the combination of size, hierarchy and complexity means that hand-crafted, manual design is no longer practical or efficient, and CDA becomes essential. Custom design automation tools must deliver not only hand-crafted quality, but must be easily integrated into existing design environments without the need for a large CAD department, making full interoperability an absolute necessity.

“The IPL Alliance has built significant momentum in both membership and iPDK availability. We welcome Pulsic’s joining the alliance to help expand interoperability in the custom design space,” stated Jingwen Yuan, president of the IPL Alliance and strategic alliance manager at Synopsys. “As a contributing member, Pulsic will have the opportunity to help evolve existing IPL Alliance standards and define emerging ones.”

“Increased interoperability is a key to wider adoption of custom design automation technologies and methodologies,” stated Ken Roberts, CEO of Pulsic. “It will help reinforce that automation improves custom designers’ productivity, letting them complete more complex designs in considerably less time. Industry-wide collaboration is the only way interoperability is going to happen in a timely manner, and we are making the commitments necessary to help drive that collaboration.”

Mark Waller, Vice President of Research and Development at Pulsic, and Tom Quan, deputy director of design service marketing at TSMC and IPL board member, will participate in an analog and mixed signal interoperability panel during the 47th Design Automation Conference (DAC) at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, Calif. DAC is the world’s leading technical conference and tradeshow covering the latest trends in electronic design and design automation, and will be held June 13-18. Mark Waller and Tom Quan will participate in the Pavilion Panel “Analog Interoperability: What’s the ROI?” to be held on Wednesday, June 16 from 3:30 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. at booth #694.