Barcelona's software, created by Mar Hershenson and Stephen Boyd, two company principals and former Stanford University researchers, consists of two pieces: a kind of software console and a software engine that plugs into it. The engine contains mathematical equations that show how circuit specifications translate into an electrical design, while the console serves as a user interface that allows an engineer to plug in different specs. The console also allows assembly of the engine's translations into a finished design. A designer first selects a specific engine, which is tied to a particular chip maker's manufacturing facility and process. The Prado software provides different engines because chip makers, although they follow the same general manufacturing principles, diverge on the details, often making subtle changes or using different materials. The designer then plugs in the necessary requirements for the finished circuit design, including frequency, or clock speed; power consumption; and manufacturing process. Manufacturing might, for example, entail a 0.13- or 0.18-micron process for creating the features on the chip. Shifts in size can affect the size, heat, spead and cost of processors. Once the desired specifications have been entered, Santos said, the engineer can "press go, and what the system will do is calculate the design that will meet those specifications." And, Santos said, unlike a design tool that relies on generic templates, Barcelona's Prado program maps out the best circuit design based on the specific information it has about what the engineer wants and on what it knows about the relevant manufacturing process. Is the secret in the sauce?
Some designers might say that designing an analogue circuit is a lot like making a good pasta sauce: home-made always tastes better, even though canned varieties are arguably cheaper and much faster. Despite his reservations, however, Intel's Fazio said the creation of new design tools for analogue circuits benefits designers by offering more choice. "We have lots of software tools for analog design," Fazio aid. "Automation is just a piece of those. That type of technology does have its place. You need hammers, but you also must have a drill." The Barcelona tools don't come cheap. The company sells a yearly subscription for its Prado software and manufacturing process engines, each of which starts in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a result, each new circuit design costs about $150,000. However, Santos said, "it's very cheap, considering what it allows you to do." Costs could be much higher, he said, if a company developed a design from scratch or hired an outside vendor to do the job. And companies using Barcelona's software could break even after just two to four designs, and could bring a chip to market more quickly, he said. Once an engineer completes a design with Prado, it gets merged into a licensee's system-on-chip product. System-on-chip processors, present in a wide range of devices from set-top boxes to networking equipment, are becoming more popular for use in consumer electronics, communications and networking gear. They can run an entire device, without the need for separate chips, and can thus help cut down on costs. So far, Barcelona has only one engine available -- for the 0.18-micron phase lock loop or PLL circuitry used by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., one of the most popular contract chip manufacturers. It plans to release first one and then eventually two new additional engines per quarter. Though many chip makers use contract manufacturers such as TSMC, many do not. AMD and Intel, for example, design and manufacture almost all of their own chips. Barcelona plans to offer a service for companies such as these -- creating a custom circuit-design engine based on a company's own internal manufacturing processes.
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