Siemens Acquires Avatar

Siemens has signed an agreement to acquire Santa Clara, CA-based Avatar Integrated Systems Inc., a developer of place and route software for integrated circuit (IC) design. Avatar helps engineers optimize power, performance and area (PPA) for complex chips with fewer resources.

Siemens plans to add Avatar's technology to the Xcelerator portfolio as part of Mentor's IC suite of software. Avatar will be integrated with existing products from Mentor, a Siemens Business, including the Calibre platform, Tessent software and Catapult HLS software.

“Customers are accelerating their move to advanced process nodes. Navigating the increasing complexity is a crucial challenge,” says Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president, Mentor IC EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Avatar's innovative software architecture, as well as a reputation for ease of use, helps customers overcome this complexity with advanced node place and route capability. The Avatar solution, backed by Siemens' investment, will offer customers shorter time to design closure with better PPA results than existing competitive offerings.”

At 7nm and below, detailed routing must be considered during placement. Avatar pioneered a detailed-route-centric architecture that has been built bottom-up on a unified in-memory data model, designed to enable all engines to access full design data and attributes at any time. This empowers each engine (placement, routing, timing, optimization, clock tree synthesis, etc.) to dynamically invoke other engines incrementally.

“Avatar's approach can lead to excellent correlation through all phases of place and route, with improved PPA results,” says Ping San Tzeng, chief technical officer, Avatar Integrated Systems. “As a part of Siemens, Avatar can further develop this approach, accelerate R&D, and grow market share by leveraging a much larger pool of resources.”  

Avatar's products are built on technologies acquired from ATopTech Inc. in 2017. The product line includes Aprisa, a netlist-to-GDS full-function block-level physical implementation tool, and Apogee, a complete top-level prototyping, floor-planning and chip assembly tool. 

Siemens' acquisition of Avatar is expected to close in the second half of 2020. Terms of the transaction are not disclosed.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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