Sunnyvale, California–Enabling innovation and production of complex semiconductor products, Monterey Design Systems today announced that STMicroelectronics will use Dolphin, the company’s physical design system for 0.18- and 0.12-micron designs.

“We are working closely with Monterey to support Dolphin within our 0.18- and 0.12-micron CMOS design kits. This will provide our designers with an alternative to their current place and route solutions. Dolphin offers them capabilities for significantly reducing design schedules and increasing throughput in their very deep sub-micron designs,” says Jean-Claude Marin, design kits manager at STMicroelectronics’ Central R&D. “Design kits for these technologies will be delivered in the first half of this year.”

Semiconductor companies moving to design with geometries smaller than 0.25-micron are retooling their design flows to enable design closure as they face new challenges created by more complex design rules and signal integrity issues at higher speeds and greater circuit densities. As they move to smaller geometries, STMicroelectronics has chosen to offer Dolphin, Monterey’s highly integrated, IC physical implementation solution, as a complement to traditional iterative, point tool design flows. STMicroelectronics reports that its decision was based on Dolphin-s successful completion of a complex 0.18-micron design, code-named IVT.

“We are proud of our relationship with one of the fastest growing system-on- chip semiconductor companies in the world,” says Jacques Benkoski, president and chief executive officer of Monterey Design Systems. “Deploying Dolphin within a world-class facility such as STMicroelectronics is a significant testimony to the value Dolphin adds as designs reach the 0.18- and 0.12-micron level. We have demonstrated that the multi-dimensional and simultaneous optimization algorithms within Dolphin allow it to handle with ease the mounting problems increasingly faced by designers as they go below 0.25-micron.”