Barcelona Opens Synthesis Tools to Customers

Update: Barcelona has been bought by Synopsys

Powerful, easy-to-use analog synthesis tools allow leading-edge analog designers to meet time-to-market and yield requirements

NEWARK, Calif. — June 1, 2004 — Barcelona Design, Inc. announced that it is opening up its silicon-proven synthesis technology to analog designers through the launch of two new equation-based modeling and optimization products. Barcelona’s new products will enable leading-edge analog designers to rapidly design their own circuits to achieve both performance and yield targets in time-to-market. With this launch Barcelona increases its focus and charges ahead to be the leading EDA vendor providing next generation analog tools and libraries that meet leading-edge requirements.

Barcelona’s new tools are StudioTM Circuit Modeler and SculptorTM Circuit Synthesizer.
Studio, previously available only within Barcelona, enables customers to capture the design intent of any circuit – at the system, block and device levels – into synthesizable equations and constraints. Studio offers a broad variety of modeling techniques that allow analog designers to trade off development effort, operational ranges and accuracy as they develop their circuit models. Designers use Sculptor to rapidly synthesize these models into optimally sized circuits that meet performance and manufacturability specifications. Barcelona’s synthesis technology enables simultaneous optimization of performance goals, process variation, voltage, and temperature constraints with over 100,000 parameters. The speed and accuracy of Sculptor delivers performance and yield targets one to two orders of magnitude faster than traditional simulation-based methods.

Unlike simulation-based methods that do not scale well to complex circuits and nanometer processes, Barcelona’s analog synthesis technology has scaled extremely well to complex circuits such as analog-to-digital converters and has been silicon validated in nanometer processes. Studio and Sculptor work with Barcelona’s synthesizable model libraries, which cover a broad range of applications from building blocks such as opamps to clocking and data converter systems. Barcelona’s analog synthesis solution is integrated with Cadence-based design flows for schematic entry, importation of parasitic data, and SPICE simulators for model validation. Additional design flows will be supported in future releases.

Richard Tobias, vice president, ASIC and Foundry business unit, System LSI Group, Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. said, "As we push the performance and yield envelope, we are faced with the challenging task of meeting ever-tightening, time-to-market windows. Barcelona has demonstrated to us that its silicon-proven analog synthesis technology addresses a critical need in the SoC market."

“We have validated our analog synthesis technology in silicon over the last two years at leading semiconductor firms. During this period, chip designers have demanded that we open up our modeling and synthesis tools to an analog design community that must have a next generation solution to meet mounting time to market and manufacturability pressures,” said Ariel Sella, CEO of Barcelona. “We made a huge investment in making this powerful optimization technology silicon-proven, easy to use and well integrated with customer design flows. Equation-based analog synthesis marks a generational change in analog design, a change that is forced as development cycles exceed market windows. We are excited about this unique opportunity to open up and share the power of this technology with the analog design community.”

Studio and Sculptor will be available in Q304 and will be priced to start at $ 150,000 for a one-year subscription.

About Barcelona Design, Inc.
Barcelona Design is an EDA company offering automated transistor-level optimization tools. Unlike simulation-based methods that utilize a SPICE-and-tweak approach to verify that design objectives have been met, Barcelona’s proven equation-based analog synthesis methodology enables analog designers to target desired specifications offering the shortest time-to-market and improved yields for complex high performance circuits. Barcelona’s customers include Analog Devices, Matsushita, STMicroelectronics and Toshiba. Barcelona’s investors include Sequoia Capital, Foundation Capital, Crosslink Capital and Joe Costello, former CEO of Cadence Design Systems. The firm is headquartered in Newark, CA. For more information please visit www.barcelonadesign.com.