NEWARK, Calif. - May 24th, 2004 - Prolific Inc., the leading provider of design optimization and automated standard cell creation software, today announced that ProTiming™ a tool for design optimization, has now extended its capabilities to enable signal integrity (SI) repair in the IC implementation flow. To achieve this, ProTiming uses the unique capabilities in Synopsys' PrimeTime® SI, the de facto standard for signal integrity analysis and sign-off. By linking the two tools, Prolific enables designers to offer final-pass optimizations for timing, power, and signal integrity during sign-off in a matter of hours.

"Signal integrity-induced timing delays are a serious problem in 90 nanometer designs that push performance," said Brian Millar of the Motorola Core Platform Creation Group within the Wireless Division. "After exhausting all means of timing improvements through IPO sizing, buffer insertion, routing modifications, etc. and still missing timing, it is very powerful to have the extra degree of freedom that ProTiming with Primetime SI offers to fix the violating paths."

ProTiming performs design-specific timing optimization during the static timing analysis step of the physical design flow. The software starts optimization after other tools are finished, makes use of cells already existing in the library, and can result in up to a 20 percent improvement in performance and power without modifying RTL, changing placement, or adding complex cells to the design. ProTiming is in use by top semiconductor companies around the world.

ProTiming 4.4 Features Include

• Cross Talk Corrections
• Fixes Hold-Time Violations
• 4X Run-Time Speed-Up
• Multimillion-gate Design Capacity

Achieving timing and signal integrity closure is a significant challenge in IC designs at 130 nanometers and below, where signal integrity effects such as crosstalk, noise and IR drop become more prevalent. PrimeTime SI addresses this challenge with an SI analysis solution that is fully integrated with PrimeTime, the most widely used tool for static timing analysis (STA) sign-off. Through this seamless integration, PrimeTime SI delivers a comprehensive, easy-to-use SI analysis and sign-off solution that ensures higher accuracy and increased user productivity.

Availability

ProTiming 4.4 is available today and supports the Solaris, HP-UX and Linux platforms.

About Prolific

Prolific Inc.'s IC design optimization software significantly reduces time to tapeout by automatically improving performance or reducing power consumption of cell-based designs. Prolific's customers include companies like AMD, NEC, ARM, and Broadcom. Prolific is a 10-year-old, privately held, profitable company based in Silicon Valley, at 39899 Balentine Dr., Suite 380, Newark, CA 94560, telephone (510) 252-0490, fax (510) 252-0491. For more information, visit http://www.prolificinc.com/.

ProGenesis is a registered trademark and ProTiming is a trademark of Prolific, Inc. PrimeTime is a registered trademark of Synopsys, Inc. Prolific acknowledges trademarks or registered trademarks of other organizations for their respective products and services.