Silver Technology to Convert Hard Cores to Synthesizable Silicon

Electronic News, March 1, 1999

Austin, Texas -- Silver Technology, located here, will announce today a service offering that uses its SilverBullet tool to convert `hard' or non-customizable silicon cores to cores that are synthesizable or able to be customized. The company said this will enable the $100 billion of silicon intellectual property that is depreciating in value to be reused in new designs and licensed to customers.

Conversion of hard cores to synthesizable cores is a process lacking the correct tools, Silver Technology said, and also lacks trained engineers to conduct such services. Cores must be synthesizable to sell to a large audience, and Silver Technology believes it will win the market by offering its conversion service.

After converting hard cores, Silver Technology uses formal verification tools from Chrysalis Symbolic Design, N. Billerica, Mass., to ensure the design is correct. Silver Technology also supplies testbenches in industry-standard simulation environments for customer verification, and provides options for the insertion of scan or increased test coverage.

Silver Technology hopes its SilverBullet tool and services will allow semiconductor companies the opportunity of making millions of dollars from licensing and royalties from what would be `throw away IP' in a few years.

Specifically, the SilverBullet tool is said to allow users to conduct cycle accurate conversion, maintain original hierarchy to improve maintainability, perform formal verification at every level, verify design with PLI I/F, utilize industry standard netlists including SPICE, Verilog and EDIF, generate either Verilog or VHDL RTL, improve test coverage, insert scan test, and generate scan vectors.

Companies currently have three choices for migrating old designs, those being optical shrink, abandon design or conversion of custom design to Register Transfer Language (RTL).

Optical shrink is commonly used, but is costly and requires much effort. The second choice, abandoning the design, may work for some companies, but may cost the company some customers. Silver Technology believes conversion is the best choice because it not only maintains the customer, but also allows for future migration.