MunEDA's tool family, WiCkeD, is selected by Faraday for its Analog IP Porting

Hsin-Chu, Taiwan; Munich, Germany -- June 1, 2007 -- MunEDA today announced that it has entered a long-term licensing agreement with Faraday Technology regarding MunEDA's DFM-DFY tool family - WiCkeD . As one of the leading fabless ASIC and silicon intellectual property (SIP) vendors , Faraday adopts powerful tools for the internal IP Porting and Technology Migration flow. By choosing MunEDA's leading-edge technology to improve design performance and yield , Faraday is well armed for the new challenges in the nano era .

“MunEDA's WiCkeD plays an important role in our IP porting project, and it presents the capabilit ies as an optimization tool . Through its comprehensive GUI and script-based flow, we successfully demonstrate our optimized circuit process. Also, t he capacity is a common issue for the simulation-based optimization tool , and we are glad to have WiCkeD to solve it,, ” Said Thomas Hsieh, R&D Associate Vice President at Faraday .

Techniques used for Faraday's automated IP Porting Flow include MunEDA tools for Constraint Management, Feasibility optimization, Simulation Environment, Sensitivity Analysis, Nominal Diagnosis and Nominal Optimization. These are incorporated into an automated script-based IP porting flow that can significantly speed up the technology migration of analog library cells, which is crucial for most analogue designs. In the next stage , MunEDA plans to also include its statistical analysis and yield optimization methods into Faraday's design flow.

“Analog synthesis is a dream feature for IP vendors. Faraday has been accumulating the experience and capability of analog IP porting as well as analog synthesis. We appreciate WiCkeD can help on this , ” s aid Yeong-Jar Chang, Deputy Director of Infrastructure R&D Center at Faraday.

“We are impressed with the fact that the porting process was successfully driven from 0.18um to 90 nm in less than 90 minutes, including the layout, by the script language provided by WiCkeD in the optimization plan .For a designer without this tool, t he same task commonly requires days of efforts. The simple setup procedure and intuitive flow especially make WiCkeD a useful tool kit for automatic circuit optimization , ” said David Wu, R&D Technical Director at Faraday .

“We very much welcome Faraday as MunEDA's new customer and partner , ” s tated Andreas Ripp, Vice President of Sales & Marketing and Managing Director at MunEDA. “Being an integral part of Faraday's IP porting flow is an excellent application for our analysis and optimization technology. As Faraday is a leader in ASIC and SIP worldwide , we are glad that we can contribute to their design efficiency and assurance of design quality”.

About Faraday Technology Corporation
Faraday Technology Corporation is a leading silicon IP and fabless ASIC vendor. The company's broad silicon IP portfolio includes 32-bit RISC CPUs, DSPs, MPEG4, H.264, PHYs/Controllers for USB 2.0, Ethernet, Serial ATA, PCI Express, Cell Library and Memory Compiler. With more than 700 employees and 2006 revenue of US$171 million, Faraday is one of the largest fabless ASIC companies in the Asia-Pacific region, and it also has a significant presence in other world-wide markets. Headquartered in Taiwan , Faraday has service and support offices around the world, including the U.S. , Japan , Europe, and China . For more information, please visit: www.faraday-tech.com

About MunEDA
MunEDA provides leading EDA technology for analysis and optimization of yield and performance of analog, mixed-signal and digital designs. MunEDA's products and consulting enable customers to reduce the design times of their circuits and to maximize robustness and yield. MunEDA's solutions are in industrial use by leading semiconductor companies in the areas of communication, computer, memories, automotive, and consumer electronics. WiCkeD is a comprehensive and powerful software tool suite for interactive, manual, semi- and full automatic analysis, sizing, and yield optimization of analog and mixed signal circuits. For more information, please visit the MunEDA web site at www.muneda.com.