American Semiconductor Successfully Employs Silvaco's Spider Place & Route Software for 130nm Design

Boise, ID and Santa Clara, CA – Tuesday, April 14th, 2010

American Semiconductor today announced the first pass success of a 130nm chip design using their proprietary Flexfet technology and Silvaco's Mixed-Signal EDA tool flow. This advanced design, which was developed for a US Government customer, highlighted new capabilities of the Silvaco flow in the Place & Route market using the Spider tool set. Spider is an advanced place and route package delivering netlist to GDSII design without layer or complexity restrictions, placement optimization, and powerful "on the fly" what-if capabilities.

American Semiconductor Design Services has integrated Silvaco's Spider place and route tool into the Flexfet design flow, extending the use of Silvaco tools. "We have been using the Silvaco custom design, layout, and physical verification tools for a number of years for our mixed-signal designs," said Dale Wilson, Director of Design and Test at American Semiconductor. "Spider provided us with a cost effective place-and-route solution to expand our capabilities. With Silvaco's excellent customer support, our design team was able to quickly integrate Spider into our EDA flow and complete our first design with the tool."

"Our first design using Spider was a microprocessor designed in the 130nm Flexfet process," said Doug Hackler, President and CEO of American Semiconductor. "Based on our initial success with Spider, it has become our preferred place-and-route tool. We are underway with our second 130nm Flexfet design using Spider for place-and-route."

"Cost effective tools are very important for many projects we work with, from small companies doing SBIR research, commercial designs, support of government prime contractors, or directly with agencies such as Air Force, DARPA, and NASA," said Richard Chaney, General Manager of American Semiconductor. "We have had great success leveraging the Silvaco tool suite to support our ITAR-compliant Design Services group as well as providing foundry support for Flexfet Advanced CMOS."

"The successful integration of Spider into commercial and military design projects at 130nm is a major accomplishment and a victory for both small and large companies looking for Place & Route capabilities at an affordable price point," said Mark Maurer, Director of Silvaco's Government Business Division.

About American Semiconductor
American Semiconductor, Inc. is a complete silicon fabrication source, providing a complete suite of services to enable product realization from concept to fabrication. As an on-shore, ITAR compliant, pure-play U.S. foundry, American Semiconductor provides services for all aspects of wafer fabrication and process development at low cost for low to mid-volumes. Silicon services include Custom Fabrication for copy smart or copy exact replication, Flex™ Silicon on Polymer technology for flexible CMOS, and Flexfet™ advanced CMOS technology for low-power and radiation hardened applications. Design services include design, verification, layout, and test with on-shore, ITAR compliant flows. Design services are available for outside foundry processes in addition to Flexfet Advanced CMOS. American Semiconductor provides Process Design Kits (PDK) based on Silvaco software tools. To learn more about American Semiconductor, visit www.americansemi.com.

American Semiconductor, Inc., the American Semiconductor logo, Flexfet, FleX, and the Flexfet logo are trademarks of American Semiconductor, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact:
Rich Chaney
(208) 336-2773
www.americansemi.com

About Silvaco, Inc.
Silvaco, Inc. is a leading provider of TCAD, circuit simulation, and IC CAD software tools. Silvaco's tools are used by fabs for developing semiconductor processes, and design houses for developing analog, mixed-signal, and RF integrated circuits. The company provides a complete PDK-based design flow with interfaces to third-party design platforms. Silvaco has a worldwide presence with local offices in all key industrial regions in the world.

Contact:
Dr. Ivan Pesic
(408) 567-1000
www.silvaco.com