Industry Viewpoints 

"We are focused on growing our business and contributing to establishing the Philippines as a center of semiconductor excellence. Custom Designer's ease of use, productivity and interoperability have allowed us to meet the needs of our diverse international customer base."

"DRC correction in custom layout is a difficult and time-consuming activity, and we often have to go through multiple iterations to fix all errors. Bringing automation to this task will help increase engineering productivity and eliminate a tedious step in getting the layout finalized."

"A single platform for both custom and cell-based design gives us the productivity gains we need to implement our complex mixed-signal designs more quickly. Custom Designer's tight integration within the Galaxy Implementation Platform provided us with a streamlined design flow, allowing us to focus more on our design and less on tool integration issues."

"Smart phone customers demand the highest-quality images, so it is critical that we deliver camera modules early enough to be built into the next generation of phones. Synopsys' Custom Designer, coupled with expert field support, provides the most productive and complete custom implementation solution needed to meet our customers' requirements on schedule."

"To support our custom memory IP business, we needed a complete, integrated custom IC design tool suite that could be rapidly adopted and deployed. The unified custom IC design solution from Synopsys, including Custom Designer, provides the productivity and performance our engineers need to quickly design and tape out IP at the 28-nanometer node."

"We switched to Synopsys’ custom solution because it offered greater productivity for our large, complex designs compared to our previous solution. We also found that Custom Designer’s open, standards-based environment made migration straightforward, with no impact to our design schedules. This was an important factor in our decision to adopt Synopsys."

"The iPDK collaboration with Synopsys is a continuation of our design enablement initiative. With the delivery of iPDKs, we are able to address a broader market segment with our leading process technologies and give our customers more choices in adopting new EDA solutions such as Synopsys' Custom Designer."

"The introduction of Custom Designer as part of the Galaxy Design Platform provides a complete cell-based and custom design capability that we are currently deploying on our next-generation HDRC® sensor array design. Custom Designer was easy to adopt, and offers significant productivity improvements over other solutions."

"With shrinking silicon geometries, there is a growing need for on-chip temperature monitoring to increase IC longevity and optimize performance. It is important for us to quickly and reliably develop our temperature sensor IP across multiple process nodes to meet the increased demand. We chose Synopsys’ custom solution because its advanced capabilities and streamlined integration provides the productivity and performance that our engineers need to quickly design and port the IP between 65-nanometer, 40-nanometer and 28-nanometer nodes while maintaining the accuracy and integrity of the design"

"We are pleased to see that Synopsys has entered the custom design market. Given Synopsys' history of technological innovation we will be watching with interest as they develop solutions to solve the tough challenges facing custom designers today."

"To manage complexity and reduce the development times of our mixed-signal designs, we need a unified methodology for digital and analog implementation. Using Synopsys’ unified physical implementation solution on a 32-bit microcontroller design we reduced the cycle time by 25 percent from initial floorplanning to final tapeout, as compared to our previous flow. We also experienced a 2X productivity gain when performing late-stage layout ECOs, at a time in the project when schedules were compressed and time was at a premium."

"TowerJazz and Synopsys have been working together to create and promote iPDKs as an open standard for the custom design community so engineering teams only need to develop a single PDK for each process node, reducing development costs and design cycle times. Synopsys’ world-class team provided TowerJazz with on-site iPDK training as well as expertise in iPDK interoperability and validation methodologies. This collaboration further expands our relationship to offer a comprehensive, open analog/mixed-signal design solution."

"The AMS Reference Flow 2.0 delivers new analog/mixed-signal design automation capabilities for advanced process nodes. Custom Designer's environment provides a platform for rapidly developing new design capabilities and integrating TSMC advanced process technology."

"The growing analog content and complexity of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) using 45-nm and 40-nm technology today, moving soon to 28-nm and 22-nm technology, requires an integrated, full-featured analog and digital implementation solution, and strong interoperability among all the key EDA ingredients, allowing full support of legacy analog IP. We are very pleased that Synopsys' Custom Designer plans to provide all the features that advanced SoC designers are looking for, along with native OpenAccess support, which should allow smooth plug-and-play in our custom design environment, and quick migration for our legacy IP."

"We are creating new business models and innovations such as iPDK under TSMC's Open Innovation Platform. Synopsys has a highly skilled and dedicated team with expertise in developing advanced, high-quality interoperable PDKs, and offers the industry's most open custom design platform that supports iPDKs. This collaborative approach will help to more quickly deliver iPDKs to our mutual customers so that they can begin capitalizing on the benefits of an interoperable ecosystem."

"Designer productivity should quickly improve with Custom Designer's new capabilities. Additionally, the open environment and support for interoperable process design kits should enhance design reuse and portability. The 2009.06 release of Custom Designer continues Synopsys' established record of delivering differentiated capabilities with the same high quality, ease-of-use and enhanced productivity that we have come to expect."

"We have a large, growing and diverse global customer base that depends on us to deliver competitive technology and cost-optimized solutions. Many of our customers also depend on Synopsys EDA tools, including Custom Designer. Synopsys and X-FAB have worked together to provide customers with both leading-edge CMOS technology and a productive, modern AMS implementation solution."

“Our advanced CMOS image sensor designs utilize a large percentage of both analog and digital content, which traditional co-simulation solutions have been unable to verify due to capacity and performance limitations. CustomSim has accelerated our transistor-level simulations by 10x over our previous simulator, and, with its direct kernel integration to VCS, has allowed us to quickly and accurately verify our designs and run simulations that were impossible to complete before.”

“Amlogic's new AML8726-M multimedia SoC combines our proprietary HD multimedia processing engine with ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore CPU and Mali™-400MP GPU cores, setting a new standard for high-performance SoCs. Synopsys enabled us to meet aggressive tapeout schedules by reducing our chip-level mixed-signal verification time by more than 5X with CustomSim and VCS while ensuring high-quality verification.”

"Analog Bits is the premier clocking IP supplier with a flawless track record of delivering first-time working silicon at the leading merchant semiconductor foundries and prestigious IDMs. To maintain our record of excellence, we rely on the accuracy of the HSPICE simulator, which is supported by silicon-verified models from each of our foundry partners. Synopsys' CustomSim simulator provides us with high-performance functional verification of our complex analog/mixed-signal IP with 10-15X faster time to results. With Custom WaveView, we can thoroughly verify critical performance specifications of our 10Gbit SERDES, easily generating eye diagrams to measure jitter and signal integrity of our programmable interconnect solutions.”

"GSI Technology designs a large selection of synchronous and asynchronous SRAMs, most of which are the fastest and lowest-power devices of their type in the world. We depend on transistor-level simulation and custom hand-crafted layout to extract the highest performance from our designs while minimizing power consumption. Our previous FastSPICE solution from a competing EDA vendor was generating unreliable timing data that prevented us from taping out. CustomSim delivered silicon-accurate results six times faster, allowing us to run more corners and tape out with confidence.”

"We rely on HSPICE to simulate our analog designs with sophisticated digital control logic functions. Using the latest HSPICE Precision Parallel technology on a data converter, we obtained a 7X speed-up on eight cores, reducing a multiple-day simulation to about 8 hours. HPP enables our analog engineers to improve productivity by simulating multiple iterations of the designs in a single day.”

"HSPICE has a long-standing reputation for providing golden accuracy for silicon device models and integrated circuit simulation. With HSPICE, Intrinsity continues to deliver groundbreaking high-speed, low-power embedded core designs for the semiconductor industry. In addition, HSPICE simulated our 45-nanometer circuits more than six times faster than other commercial circuit simulators. We are confident that HSPICE will continue to meet our needs for fast, high-accuracy simulation for 45-nanometer and below designs.”

"Rapidly changing market forces in consumer electronics are driving us to deliver SoCs in a continuously shrinking timeframe. To achieve aggressive tapeout schedules, we need a circuit simulation solution that not only delivers superior performance but also has the capacity to simulate our largest designs with required accuracy. Our evaluation clearly demonstrated CustomSim’s superior performance and capacity advantage over other competing analog simulators. We have seen an average improvement of 10X in analog IP verification throughput and are confident that CustomSim will meet our present and future transistor-level and mixed-signal verification needs.”

"The combination of CustomSim and VCS allowed us to shorten our design cycle while delivering silicon-accurate results. The CustomSim mixed-signal solution delivered better silicon correlation, performance and ease-of-use over other competitive tools, which was critical in enabling us to achieve first silicon success on a recent RF SoC design.”

"The combination of CustomSim and VCS allowed us to shorten our design cycle while delivering silicon-accurate results. The CustomSim mixed-signal solution delivered better silicon correlation, performance and ease-of-use over other competitive tools, which was critical in enabling us to achieve first silicon success on a recent RF SoC design.”

“Many Sigrity customers have made major investments in HSPICE over the years and rely on it as a trusted gold-standard of circuit simulation. Sigrity has pioneered several application-specific electromagnetic analysis solutions integrated with HSPICE that provide the accuracy essential for high-speed designs in an environment that supports rapid design improvement.”

“To accurately model MOSFET transistors at 40 nanometers and below, TSMC is exploring new modeling methodologies that deliver the best simulation performance without accuracy changes. With the development of the TMI specification and computer software, TSMC overcomes the limitations of the sub-circuit macro modeling approach that has been in use for several generations of technology nodes. This leads to improvements in both 40-nanometer computer simulation time and memory usage.”