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LACE STAR Maintain Design Hierarchy
LACE MEGA Automatically Compacts 4 Million or More Transistors Without Manual Partitioning

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA--June 3, 1996--Design Automation Conference--Rubicad Corp., a supplier of integrated circuit layout conversion tools, today announced two new products based on the company's Layout Conversion Environment (LACE) ---LACE MEGA and LACE STAR. LACE MEGA handles larger layouts without manual partitioning and LACE STAR maintains standard cell design hierarchy during the compaction process.

Michael Reinhardt, Rubicad's president and founder, said  "As design reuse and migration  becomes more important, our customers have asked us to add new capabilities to LACE to help them improve their IC layout conversions. LACE MEGA and LACE STAR are answers to their requests."

LACE STAR and LACE MEGA are based on the existing LACE product. They add new capabilities for designers who need to maintain standard cell hierarchy and save time with automatic partitioning of large layouts.

LACE MEGA has no memory limitations; it automatically partitions a layout during the compaction process and compacts the design piece by piece. For example, a 4 million transistor circuit is automatically compacted with an automatic partitioning during the conversion flow.

LACE STAR maintains the hierarchy of a standard cell layout during the compaction process. With LACE STAR a 200,000 transistor circuit or standard cell library is compacted as a single block and reused in new designs.

About LACE:
LACE automatically converts existing design layouts for use with new fabs or technologies. Using LACE to convert an existing layout improves time-to-market and allows design and layout engineers to optimize an existing layout for performance, power or area utilization. IC layout conversions take one to two weeks to setup, and 20 hours of CPU time to automatically convert a typical 50,000 transistor design on a Sun Sparc 20 workstation. Similar manual conversions take several man months.
With LACE, a layout is automatically converted to follow new design rules and new transistor and wire sizing within hours. LACE is a very physical tool and operates directly on the layout by moving edge by edge, just like a human designer would do it. Circuit functionality, topology and net list remain the same.

LACE compacts and converts full custom, standard cell and synthesized layouts. It converts standard GDSII mask layout files from one technology to another. LACE's automatic layout conversion can be customized for any design style (standard cell, full custom or synthesized). LACE users report that their IC design and layout times improve by up to 10 times.

Availability:
LACE for Sun's UNIX workstations and is shipping now; LACE MEGA and LACE STAR ship 9/96.

LACE MEGA and LACE STAR will be demonstrated for the first time at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) at the Las Vegas Convention Center, booth number 1724, June 3 through June 5, 1996. Rubicad will participate in the DAC exhibitor presentations on Monday, June 3 at 3.00pm in Room N242 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
In April, Rubicad announced conversion speed, memory utilization and usability improvements to LACE.

About Rubicad:
Rubicad Corp., headquartered in San Jose, CA, is a pioneer in applying automatic IC layout conversion techniques to existing design layouts. 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 more information, contact Rubicad Corp., 1150 North First St., Suite 140, 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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