- The acquisition expands Siemens' Xcelerator portfolio, increasing current integrated circuit design solutions with pioneering positioning and routing software.
- Avatar technology strengthens Siemens' leadership in silicon projects, with positioning and routing for advanced node design.
Siemens signed an acquisition agreement for Avatar Integrated Systems Inc., based in Santa Clara, California, a developer of positioning and routing software for integrated circuit (CI) projects.
Avatar technology helps engineers optimize power, performance and area (PPA) of complex chips with fewer resources. Siemens plans to add Avatar technology to the Xcelerator portfolio as part of the IC software package from Mentor, a Siemens Group company, capitalizing on the growing positioning and routing segment. Avatar technology will be integrated with Mentor's market-leading products, including Caliber ® platform , The Tessent ™ software it's the HLS Catapult ™ software , to help customers develop solutions that meet current and future project implementation challenges.
"Customers are accelerating their migration to us of advanced processes, as meeting the increasing complexity is a major challenge," said Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president of CI EDA at Mentor, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Avatar's innovative architecture and ease of use help customers overcome this complexity with advanced node positioning and routing capabilities. Avatar's solution, with the support of Siemens' investments, will decrease the project time, with better PPA results than the other available solutions. We are pleased to welcome the Avatar team and community to Siemens. ”
Avatar pioneered the centralized architecture in detailed routing, built from the bottom up in a unified in-memory data model, designed to allow all mechanisms to access complete design data and attributes at any time. This allows each mechanism (positioning, routing, time, optimization, clock tree synthesis, etc.) to dynamically access other mechanisms gradually.
“Avatar's approach can lead to excellent correlation across all phases of positioning and routing, with better PPA results,” said Ping San Tzeng, technical director at Avatar Integrated Systems. “As part of Siemens, Avatar can further develop this approach, in addition to accelerating R&D and increasing its market share, using a much larger set of resources. We are proud of our technical achievements and our track record of excellent customer support, so we look forward to enhancing these strengths now at Siemens. ”
Avatar products are developed based on technologies acquired from ATopTech Inc. in 2017. The product line includes Aprisa, a physical implementation tool for block simulation and complete functions, from netlist (port level) to GDS (data fractured), and Apogee, a complete top-level prototyping tool, board planning and chip assembly. Major semiconductor foundries in the industry have qualified Avatar products for consolidated and advanced process node designs, such as 28nm and 7nm, in addition to 6nm and 5nm nodes (under development).
The acquisition of Avatar by Siemens is expected to close in the second half of 2020. The terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.
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