Pyxis Technology Announces Plan to Enter DFM Routing Spacea

EDA startup comes out of stealth mode; announces plans for new IC routing architecture optimized for the challenges of sub-100 nm technology nodes

New software promises to optimize designs for the manufacturing process, simplify the post-tapeout flow, and improve design yield

Santa Clara, Calif., November 21, 2005 -- Pyxis Technology, an electronic design automation (EDA) company founded in 2004, today announced that it is developing new integrated circuit (IC) and system on chip (SoC) routing software for complex nanometer IC designs. The new software will have an architecture optimized for the challenges of sub-100 nm manufacturing process technology. It is expected to reduce design-based yield limiters by optimizing designs for a given manufacturing process, reduce the time spent on timing closure, simplify the post-tapeout flow, and improve design yield.

"Current chip design flows are aging, and they are breaking at 90nm and below," said Naeem Zafar, Pyxis president and CEO. "Current routers are not architected to pass design intent forward, cannot optimize designs for manufacturability and are unable to make trade-offs, so yield suffers. Chip designers need new routing architectures that can scale with the new nanometer technology nodes."

"Yield is no longer just area and random defects," said Jim Solomon, founder of Cadence Design Systems and a member of the Pyxis Board of Directors. "Design drives yield, and design must be done differently to address all types of yield -- parametric, systematic, and statistical. Pyxis has the experience, the long-range vision, and the team to execute on their goal of providing a routing architecture that is truly optimized for sub- 100 nm technology nodes."

Pyxis’ new architecture is centered on design for manufacturing (DFM). With novel algorithms that make it aware of the manufacturing flow, the software enables designers to trade off between design and manufacturing constraints during design \u2013 not after the chip is in the hands of manufacturing. Design intent is passed forward to mask data preparation steps, which simplifies manufacturing cost and time.

According to Zafar, passing thousands of constraints from manufacturing to design has become far too complex, requiring a change in approach from design rule checking (DRC) rules to DFM models. Not only are there too many rules for sub-100nm designs, but also many of the "rules" are really guidelines or suggestions \u2013 "soft rules" rather than "hard rules." New routing architectures must understand the new DFM models and be able to handle all the constraints intelligently.

For sub-100 technology nodes, routing software will need to use multiple simulation and optimization engines that interact efficiently and make the complex tradeoffs needed between design and manufacturing. In addition, the complexity of DRC and timing closure has increased with today’s nanometer technologies, and without a new routing architecture, designers will spend significantly more time on design closure.

About Pyxis
Pyxis Technology is developing software that addresses the problems chip designers and foundries face in the physical design, layout, and routing of nanometer-scale integrated circuits (ICs) and systems on a chip (SoCs). Pyxis was founded in 2004 by three industry veterans with extensive experience in semiconductor IC design and EDA software development. The company has raised Series A funding from Austin Ventures and CMEA Ventures. For more information, see www.pyxistech.com.