ProPlus Introduces NanoYield™ Integrated Circuit Design Tool

Highly-efficient design for yield (DFY) tool enabled by patented technology licensed from IBM

San Jose, California - October 28, 2011 ProPlus Design Solutions, Inc. (ProPlus), today announced a new product called NanoYield™, which was developed to enable highly-efficient integrated circuit yield analysis and design optimizations, and is based on patented technology licensed from IBM.

The new product, which is part of the NanoDesigner™ circuit design platform, tackles the impact of increasing process variations at advanced process nodes. NanoYield™ provides an efficient way to estimate the product yield and guide the designer to achieve the optimal yield and performance tradeoff. It builds on the foundation of the advanced variation modeling components in the industry's leading SPICE modeling tool BSIMProPlus™ that extracts accurate statistical and corner models to enable accurate Monte Carlo and PVT analysis.

NanoYield™ is also powered by ProPlus's innovative parallel statistical simulation engine which speeds up any type of statistical simulations, including traditional Monte Carlo by 10X-100X at full SPICE accuracy. NanoYield™ further improves the statistical simulation performance by incorporating advanced sampling technologies.

The technology ProPlus licensed from IBM is patented algorithms and methodologies for statistic sampling and yield calculation of Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) and many other applications. NanoYield™ delivers several orders of magnitude of speedup over traditional Monte Carlo for high-sigma analysis and the simulation time can be cut from several months to several minutes. Technology development engineers can also use the solution to validate the process and improve the yield of SRAM and standard library cells.

"This agreement with IBM will enable ProPlus customers to benefit from the leading edge and proven innovation from IBM in the area of Design for Yield (DFY) ," said Dr. Zhi-Hong Liu, Executive Chairman of ProPlus Design Solutions, Inc., " We also look forward to collaborating further with IBM in this area."

"IBM is committed to licensing its intellectual property to encourage innovation and collaboration around the world," said Tom Reeves, vice president of IBM, Business Development and Licensing. "Our technology licensing agreement with ProPlus provides a foundation for both companies to cooperate in providing better integrated circuit design solutions."

Specific terms of the agreement will not be disclosed.

The NanoYieldTM product is available to sell starting November 2011. For evaluation requests and pricing, please send email to info@proplussolution.com.


About ProPlus:
ProPlus Design Solutions, Inc. delivers Electronic Design Automation (EDA) solutions with the mission to enhance the linkage between design and manufacture. The company provides cutting edge solutions for Design for Yield (DFY), that consists of a device modeling technology platform BSIMProPlus™, targeted at nanometer device fabrication, and circuit design and electrical verification platforms, NanoDesigner™ and NanoVerifier™, targeted to meet the challenges of performance and yield trade-off for advanced analog and digital circuit designs. The company has R&D centers in the Silicon Valley, Beijing and Jinan, and branch offices in Tokyo, Hsinchu, and Shanghai.