Low-cost design of mixed-signal ASICS with no previous experience is aim of ViaDesigner EDA tool

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., 25 March 2012. Triad Semiconductor in Winston, Salem, N.C., and Mentor Graphics Corp. in Wilsonville, Ore., are working together to develop and introduce the ViaDesigner design and development tool for mixed-signal integrated circuit design (IC), which enables new IC development in two to six months, allows re-spins in less than four weeks, and can reduce the cost and risk of custom mixed-signal IC design, company officials say.

The companies plan to introduce ViaDesigner at the Embedded Systems Conference this week in San Jose, Calif. The electronic design automation (EDA) tool is designed to help system-level engineers with no previous IC design experience to design their own mixed-signal configurable application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), company officials say.

The mixed-signal ASIC design tool is built on system-level design technology from Mentor Graphics and Triad's intelligent ViaASIC library wizards. Triad specializes in low-cost mixed-signal via configurable arrays, known as ViaASICs., while Mentor Graphics is an EDA software vendor.

The foundation for ViaDesigner is the SystemVision design environment from Mentor Graphics, which merges design capture, SPICE simulation, digital simulation, and high-level VHDL-AMS behavioral modeling into a unified design flow.

Triad's ViaDesigner tunes and extends the SystemVision environment by adding a set of ViaASIC library wizards to design mixed-signal circuits while freeing the designer from creating a full-custom IC layout. ViaDesigner output is mapped to a ViaASIC with Triad's ViaPath place-and-route software.

For more information contact Triad Semiconductor online at www.triadsemi.com, or Mentor Graphics at www.mentor.com.

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