A new electronic design automation start-up, Antrim Design Systems Inc, announced its plans for top-down methodology analog and mixed-signal semiconductor design tools yesterday, and introduced its first tools. Antrim, a two-year old Scotts Valley, California-based company, says it will deliver software design tools and services providing high-level, mixed-signal design, paralleling and integrating with digital design during early development. Yesterday, the company launched an integrated tool set to automate design of mixed-signal, system-on-chip semiconductors. The tools, now available, include a full-chip simulator, Antrim-A/MS, and Antrim-ACT for characterization and behavioral model generation.
Electronic systems need analog interfaces to function in the real world, but design tools for analog engineers – along with analog designers themselves – are scarce. Antrim says it is attempting to take the mystery out of mixed signal design, something logic synthesis tools did in the digital design world back in the late 1980s. Mixed signal ICs sales are being boosted by consumer, multimedia and communications equipment sales, and according to Hambrecht and Quist, the segment is now the fastest growing portion of the semiconductor market. Revenue is set to double between 1996 and 2000 more than $34 billion.
Antrim aims to provide productivity improvements through automation at the highest levels of abstraction, through mixed-signal intellectual property design reuse. Because they are mostly still manual, analog design tasks are currently a significant bottleneck in getting mixed-signal, system-on-chip designs to market. Current design tools operate mostly in the lower levels of the design flow and lack efficient integration in the design flow. Antrim says its methodology addresses the entire mixed signal design flow as a single design discipline, instead of splitting the job into separate analog and digital steps.
Antrim was co-founded by president and CEO Roy McGuffin, previously at circuit simulation company Meta-Software Inc, along with Bendt Sorensen, vice president of technology, Thomas Quarles, engineering director, and S. Peter Liebmann, engineering director, all three of whom also came from Meta, which was acquired by Avant! Inc in October 1996. The other founder, Leslie Spruiell, vice president of marketing, comes from Epic Design Technology Inc.
