Altera Selects Altos’ Liberate for Ultra-Fast Characterization of 40nm HardCopy ASICs

SAN JOSE, Calif : Altos Design Automation Inc. today announced that Altera Corporation has adopted its Liberate cell characterization solution for use at 40nm. Altera will use Liberate to characterize their own specialized library cells for use in Altera’s HardCopy® III and HardCopy IV ASIC families.

Eugene Chen, director of CAD at Altera, Corporation., said, “Our HardCopy III and HardCopy IV families offer an ideal solution for high-end digital applications in several markets, including wireless and wireline communications, military and broadcast.” Chen continued, “We selected Liberate because we needed to be able to re-characterize our own custom cells so that they are optimized for our 40-nm HardCopy ASICs. In particular, we needed to be able to generate advanced current source models for timing, noise and power.”

Jim McCanny, Altos CEO and founder said, “A simple way to ensure that your designers get the most out of the advanced process technology is to tune the characterization of the standard cell library to match the target application.” McCanny continued, “Using Liberate, Altera will be able to easily characterize their most advanced cells in conjunction with commercial libraries in a consistent and highly efficient manner.”

About Liberate

Liberate is an ultra-fast library creator that generates electrical models in Liberty®, Verilog, Vital and IBIS formats. Liberate supports all the latest models for timing, noise and power such as CCS (Composite Current Source) and ECSM (Effective Current Source Models) Liberate also supports ultra low power and high speed design styles that include power gating cells, state retention registers, level shifters, pulse clocking and CML.

About Altos

Altos Design Automation provides ultra-fast, fully-automated characterization technology for the creation of library views for timing, signal integrity and power analysis and optimization. Altos advanced modeling solutions are used by both corner-based and statistical-based design implementation flows to reduce time to market and improve yield.

Privately held, Altos was founded in 2005 in Santa Clara, CA. Its corporate headquarters is at 4020 Moorpark Ave., Suite 100, San Jose, CA 95117. Telephone: (408) 980-8056. On the Web at: http://www.altos-da.com