Icera Semiconductor collaborates with Prolific for development of leading edge silicon

UK-based company chooses Prolific for advanced standard cell design

NEWARK, Calif. –– April 6, 2004 – Prolific Inc., the leading provider of design optimization and automated standard cell creation software, today announced that Icera Semiconductor selected Prolific’s ProGenesis® software to accelerate the development of its standard cell libraries, the key building blocks of digital integrated circuit (IC) design. The ProGenesis family of tools is the industry standard for fully automated creation and migration of standard cell libraries. Icera will use ProGenesis for the automated development of standard cells for its low power communication technology.

“Prolific was chosen for their commitment to automation and customer support after a thorough competitive analysis,” stated Peter Hughes, vice president of silicon operations at Icera Semiconductor. “Prolific’s software allows us to optimize our 90nm cell library quickly and efficiently to hit Icera’s class-leading performance, power and manufacturability goals.  Having a flexible approach to cell generation gives us a real time-to-market advantage in the development of Icera’s processor based product family.”

“Icera is a high competence new semiconductor company and we are pleased to be working with them,” noted Dan Nenni, vice president of marketing at Prolific. “Prolific is focused on the challenges of standard cell creation and design optimization; we are experts and welcome the challenges brought by leading-edge companies like Icera Semiconductor.”

The increasing complexity in semiconductor process technology has turned many library development teams toward automated layout creation in order to manage frequent process changes and meet aggressive time-to-market requirements. ProGenesis users can create complete standard cell libraries today, and automatically re-create at will whenever the design rules or any other design requirements change. Automatic integration of these changes is especially important in leading-edge applications, because lithography “recipe” changes can occur mid-project.

Prolific’s ProGenesis is the industry standard for fully automated creation of standard cells. Key to the tools' success is their ability to generate better-than-hand-drawn quality results in significantly less time than that of other tools or traditional methods. ProGenesis supports all 1.0 micron to 65nm process design rules, Design For Manufacture (DFM) practices to increase silicon yield and reliability, and sub-wavelength optimization Resolution Enhancement Techniques (RET): Optical Proximity Correction (OPC); Strong and Attenuated Phase-Shift Mask (PSM); Scattering Bars (SB); and Off-Axis Illumination (OAI).

About Icera
Icera Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor company that is currently developing a breakthrough new technology in the wireless terminal space.  The company was founded in 2002 by a highly experienced team of semiconductor executives and has since grown rapidly.  Funded by Benchmark Capital and Atlas Venture, the company is incorporated in the USA and has design locations in the UK.

About Prolific
Based in Silicon Valley, Prolific Inc. provides software to enable the design of today's most demanding integrated circuits optimizing quality of results with respect to timing, power, area and yield, and at the same time reducing overall design time and costs. ProTiming™ is the first commercially available optimization tool integrated into the STA step of the physical design flow. ProTiming gives IC designers up to 20% improvement in timing and power in a no-risk, fully automated and integrated flow. ProGenesis® is the leading software for automatically creating standard cells optimized for design performance, power, area and yield. Founded in 1995, Prolific counts the top semiconductor companies around the world as customers with products silicon prove in .18m through 90nm process nodes. Prolific is headquartered in Newark, Calif., at 39899 Balentine Dr., Suite 380, Newark, CA 94560, telephone (510) 252-0490, fax (510) 252-0491. For more information, visit www.prolificinc.com.

ProGenesis is a registered trademark and ProTiming is a trademark of Prolific Inc. Prolific acknowledges trademarks or registered trademarks of other organizations for their respective products and services.