IMEC, Altos team on chip design, prototyping services

PARIS — IMEC (Leuven, Belgium) and Altos Design Automation Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) have joined forces to provide re-characterization of standard foundry or library vendor libraries including core and IO cells at different process, temperatures and/or voltages.

Partners said the library re-characterization service is based on Altos' Liberate cell characterization product, and the validation of the re-characterization is performed using Altos' Liberate LV library validation system.

When designing in 65nm and 40nm nodes, re-characterization of standard cell libraries is increasingly necessary so as to get the delay, timing constraints, switching power, leakage and noise for all the corners needed for accurate design signoff, IMEC and Altos explained.

Through the collaboration, IMEC said it has extended its ASIC prototyping and volume fabrication service with library re-characterization. It can use Liberate and Liberate LV to rapidly qualify library views for electrical signoff of timing, noise and power.