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Xilinx migrates FPGA

John Mahoney's Design SuperCon Presentation Covers How Xilinx Uses Rubicad's LACE for Next Generation FPGAs

SANTA CLARA, CA.--January 21, 1997--Design SuperCon--Rubicad Corp., a supplier of integrated circuit layout conversion tools, announced that at Design SuperCon at the Santa Clara Convention Center the company is unveiling information about its new version of its Layout Conversion Environment- LACE 3.0. Also, one of Rubicad's customers, Xilinx, is giving a presentation about how LACE is being used to produce its next generations of FPGAs.

LACE 3.0 offers improvement that enhance a designer's ability to transfer designs to new technologies, especially deep submicron (DSM) technologies.

On Tuesday, January 21, John Mahoney , Xilinx's IC design manager is giving a presentation titled "Physical Design Reuse-How To Do the Latest FPGA Generation" at 1:30pm. Mahoney's presentation covers:

• how Xilinx uses Rubicad's LACE,
• a methodology for combining the density of full custom and handcrafted design with the flexibility of technology independence,
• a methodology for reusing blocks and macros with new process technologies,
• and time and cost savings for this approach.

According to Michael Reinhardt, Rubicad's president, "With deep submicron technologies, modification of the layout after simulation is necessary to adjust the layout according to the simulation results. Today, LACE is used as a design tool for making these layout adjustments. It allows users to change the geometrical structures to improve functionality and speed."
LACE 3.0 adds an intention driven user interface that automatically sets the compaction parameter according to the selected intentions. Intentions can include individual transistor sizing, sizing of power lines, increasing area or the number of substrate or well contacts. Also, LACE 3.0 automatically generates technology files and has features that allow it to work within various design environments and with different file formats."

Reinhardt noted, "With LACE 3.0, a technology file that previously took a day or more to setup could take one or two hours to setup."

What's New:
LACE 3.0 improvements include:

• the ability to handle more types of design rules, including  conditional rules, and rules for minimum area,
• improvements to LACE's ability to interface with other design environments and accept and output various file formats, in addition to GDSII;
• automatic technology file creation for verifying that rules for every relationship and every layer are automatically defined and checked;
• a more Motive-like user interface with multiple windows and features for faster setup.

LACE optimizes an IC layout for performance, area, or power consumption.  It compacts and converts full custom, standard cell and synthesized layouts. It converts standard GDSII mask layout files from one technology to another.

About Rubicad:
Rubicad Corp., headquartered in San Jose, CA, is a pioneer in developing automatic IC layout conversion software. The company offers LACE, a Layout Conversion Environment, for improving IC design and layout cycle time.

Customers include: IC manufacturers, IC design centers, semiconductor companies, fabless IC design houses and systems manufacturers.
For information, contact Rubicad Corp., 1150 North First St., Suite 130, San Jose, CA 95112, Tel: (408)995-3334, Fax: (408) 995 3335, info@rubicad.com.

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LACE is a registered trademark of Rubicad Corp.
All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

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