Pulsic launches Unity™: revolutionary all-in-one shape based physical design platform for high volume ICs

Bristol, England – Pulsic Limited, the leading software company in delivering shape-based physical design solutions, today announced the launch of Unity – a new integrated design environment targeted at the high-volume IC market.

The principal benefit of Unity is its integration: the design remains in one consistent database, reducing the cost of managing tool interfaces. Unity is a single product comprizing four components: UniPlan™ (floorplanning), UniPlace™ (placement), UniRoute™ (routing) and UniEdit™ (editing), with signal integrity and timing. Furthermore, Unity is based on a hierarchical database, and is compliant with both legacy CDBA and Open Access – removing the problem of mixed-signal “spaghetti” design flows.

A key component of Unity is UniPlan, a floorplanner with automatic block placement of both soft and hard macros. It is the first hierarchical floorplanner specifically focused on mixed signal design.

Designers currently working in non-integrated design flows are required to separate their design into analog and digital parts, making gross assumptions along the way. UniPlan provides a fully integrated solution to mixed signal design. By creating a solution with Unity, Pulsic can now deliver the very smallest area and highest yield for mixed signal and custom digital design.

Building on the successful introduction of Lyric 4-10 technology, which launched advanced placement, bias by area and pattern tidy, Pulsic has re-architected Lyric into the Unity platform and augmented it with industry standard compatible static timing to provide timing driven capabilities. In addition, Unity is backward and forward compatible with Lyric.

Mark Waller, VP Engineering at Pulsic commented, "Unity offers high-volume device designers a powerful solution in one, single environment with a common high-capacity database. As industry leaders in providing solutions for designing memory with our shape based technology, we pride ourselves on generating effective working solutions and we are confident Unity will give our customers the competitive edge.”

The Unity platform will be exhibited at the Design Automation Conference in San Francisco (24-28 July) in Booth #3073 and will start to be rolled out to customers in the second half of 2006.

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About Unity


1. UniPlan boasts a unique hierarchical floorplanning capability which provides a ‘divide and conquer’ approach in shaped based environments.

2. UniPlace brings Pulsic’s detailed placement technology, and its advanced placement capabilities to the Unity platform.

3. UniRoute is the next generation of Pulsic’s Lyric routing technology delivered under Unity and is compliant with Open Access and CDBA.

4. UniEdit incorporates Pulsic’s leading and intuitive shape based interactive and semi-automatic layout and editing features.

Unity runs on Linux/Unix and Windows operating systems and is priced from approximately $70,000, depending on configuration.

About Pulsic

Pulsic Limited is the leading software company in delivering shape-based physical IC design solutions. Pulsic provides advanced physical design automation to high-volume IC markets and specializes in memory, complex analog, custom digital and mixed-signal IC designs. Pulsic’s product range includes hierarchical floorplanning, detailed placement, automatic routing and interactive editing. Pulsic has delivered more than 150 tape-outs with over 40 customers worldwide and is the only supplier of specialized layout automation for memory; six out of the top ten memory manufacturers use Pulsic. Pulsic was founded in January 2000 and is a privately held company, headquartered in Bristol, UK. For more information, email info@pulsic.com, telephone +44 (0)117 325 5000 or visit www.pulsic.com.