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Physical design automation on mixed semi-custom arrays

Exploitable results

gateSnake offers integrated circuit (IC) designers advanced algorithms for circuit layout running on standard personal computers (PC), dramatically reducing overhead costs while retaining compact layouts. These advanced algorithms are capable of meeting a wide variety of placement and routing requirements such as routability estimation, detailed placement, and global and detailed routing, all within the memory restrictions of Windows operating systems. The main focus of the tools is on reducing die size, the main criteria by which all place and route tools are measured. This is complemented by support for more complex design rules, allowing designers to use all available routing layers and generate clean layouts without a post-processing phase. Distributed delay models accurately estimate worst case timing of layouts and ensure generated geometries comply with user limits. gateSnake interfaces directly with all popular design tools, supporting a number of standard data formats. gateSnake allows a company to realise more designs, more quickly, at lower cost and of higher complexity. This is highlighted by MEAD, which develops electronic systems for contactless identification using radio-frequency and infra-red technologies. For reasons of economy, reliability and confidentiality, this market benefits from higher integration. Using gateSnake, MEAD is designing two mixed analogue-digital ICs for their next generation products: a radio frequency (RF) emitter for the 125 kHz to 6 MHz range and an amplitude modulation (AM) demodulator coupled with a manchester-type decoder. An evaluation version of the software for all Windows versions is available free and comes complete with an electronic user manual.

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