Fujitsu Ltd has come out with an applications-specific integrated circuit design package to run on its big M-Series mainframes, which incorporates techniques developed by several American universities: the company claims that use of the software will enable a specialist engineer to complete an ASIC design in under a month compared with the current one year; it implements the BDD methodology developed at Carnegie Mellon University for fast processing of large amounts of data generated by common structures from tree to branch, and an algorithm called the transduction methods developed by Illinois University; Fujitsu is currently top of the Japanese tree in applications specific circuits, with annual revenues running at some $690m.
