Giga Scale IC Introduces Industry's First IC Economic Analysis Engine

Giga Scale Integration Corporation (Giga Scale IC) announced today that it has introduced the industry's first comprehensive IC economic analysis engine. The feature is now available as an upgrade to the company's popular InCyte chip estimation tool, which can be downloaded in a free, time-unlimited version at ChipEstimate.com. InCyte's economic analysis engine enables designers and architects to transform a high level design specification into a complete IC budgetary quotation, determining final chip cost, long before committing engineering resources for implementation.

Building upon InCyte's technical estimation results of die size, power, and leakage, the economic analysis engine provides design teams with a comprehensive understanding of both the technical and economic viability of a potential chip design. It performs a comprehensive analysis that takes into account economic dimensions including:

• Yielded silicon cost ('good die' cost)
• IC package recommendation and cost
• Test and assembly costs
• Non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs including masks, engineering, tools, and IP
• Return on investment (ROI) analysis on IP and NRE investments

The result of InCyte's economic analysis is a complete budgetary quotation and return on investment analysis detailing all of the factors which are built into the final product cost of an integrated circuit.

"For the first time, design teams can fully and accurately estimate total chip cost at the architectural level in the design flow," said Adam Traidman, President of Giga Scale IC. "Our Design for Cost methodology lets design managers understand the economic as well as the technical consequences of early architectural decisions."

The economic analysis engine also features an IC lifecycle analysis enabling designers to forecast and account for mask re-spins, increasing yields, and decreasing wafer and package costs. InCyte comes bundled with industry average silicon wafer pricing, defect density, package, and test & assembly data to support accurate forecasting of total IC cost.

InCyte was developed by Giga Scale IC to furnish IC designers, architects, and their management teams with fast and accurate chip estimates. With the addition of its new economic analysis engine, InCyte becomes the only commercial class EDA tool capable of providing designer teams with meaningful insight into the economics of IC design, enabling an understanding of the factors contributing to total chip cost, and allowing them to explore how IP, implementation, and chip architecture options can influence total chip cost.

The economic analysis engine is available as an upgrade to ChipEstimate.com users, as well as to Giga Scale IC's enterprise-class InCyte customers. Pricing for InCyte upgrades including the economic analysis engine start at $2500 per month and are available immediately.

InCyte allows users to estimate IC cost, yield, die size, power, and leakage to within five to ten percent accuracy of final silicon, as well as make architectural and economic comparisons and tradeoffs across various technology nodes, process variants and IP options. The tool has proved effective at reducing total IC cost and minimizing the duration of the design cycle.

InCyte Upgrade Options
InCyte upgrade subscriptions provide many time and cost saving benefits, including:

• Ability to generate a complete and accurate IC budgetary quote through InCyte's comprehensive IC economic analysis engine.
• Increasing estimation accuracy by offering access to specific IP vendor and foundry technology data from leading third party IP vendors and foundries.
• Providing access to advanced InCyte features such as 65nm technology modeling, specialty I/O libraries, and downstream implementation tool interfaces.

All InCyte upgrades are available on a monthly subscription basis. Longer term subscriptions also are available at a substantial discount. Upgrades may be purchased through the www.ChipEstimate.com website via a secure payment gateway. Giga Scale IC also offers an enterprise-class version of InCyte designed to meet the needs of design teams using internally developed IP libraries and process nodes. For more information, please contact Giga Scale IC.

About ChipEstimate.com
In February 2005, Giga Scale IC launched ChipEstimate.com as a means of providing designers with free, upgradeable software that estimates design costs early in the design cycle. The free version of the InCyte software lets users estimate design specifications such as die size, yield, power, leakage, and cost, and offers tradeoff analysis options to minimize cost, reduce risk, and speed time to market.

Visitors to ChipEstimate.com may register to download the InCyte client software, which arrives bundled with industry-average IP and foundry data. InCyte may then be upgraded to include valuable proprietary data from leading IP vendors and foundries.

About Giga Scale IC
Founded in 2003, Giga Scale Integration Corporation (Giga Scale IC) is a privately funded electronic design automation (EDA) company pioneering the development of tools designed to facilitate fast, accurate, and early technical and economic analysis and forecasting of IC designs. Giga Scale IC develops and markets InCyte, a chip estimation tool that dramatically reduces the risk, design time and cost of IC design. InCyte accurately estimates key IC specifications, including size, power, leakage, yield, and cost.
Web Site: http://www.gigaic.com.