February 17, 2006 – Mentor Graphics Corp., Wilsonville, OR, said its new Calibre MDP mask data preparation tool suite has been qualified for production at IDMs for 45nm process technology in flows based on the OASIS stream format, enabling IDMs to more efficiently manage the large data files needed to create a mask for integrated circuit production.

As IC production entered the 180nm node, a need emerged to apply resolution enhancement techniques to designs in order to achieve successful silicon. The resulting enormous data files, “flattened” to accommodate the mask writer format specification, ultimately delayed run times for mask writing to several days or weeks, creating a costly bottleneck. Mentor Graphics says its Calibre MDP fixes this data bottleneck by reducing the size of data files, improving tool performance and capacity and unifying geometry processing. It supports all mask writer formats: MEBES, JEOL, Toshiba/NuFlare, Hitachi and Micronic.