Synopsys, Inc. announced broad support across its advanced electronic design automation product lines for Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 Operating System on x86_64-based systems. The combination of Synopsys' powerful EDA solutions and the proven Solaris 10 OS on robust x86_64 processors can provide significant productivity gains for engineering teams developing next-generation system-on-chip designs.

    Power management has become mission-critical in 130-nanometer designs and below. To speed design convergence, reduce overall fabrication cost, and increase yield, designers today require a comprehensive RTL-to-GDSII solution for dynamic and leakage power optimization, power network synthesis in design planning, power-aware test, power analysis, and power integrity sign-off.

    Synopsys products running on the Solaris 10 OS with x86_64 platforms are expected to provide engineering teams with a higher level of performance and productivity gains because these EDA tools and systems are able to provide the sophisticated solutions needed for the design and verification of today's SoCs.

    "I am pleased to see Sun and Synopsys build on their long standing collaboration to help deliver world class electronic design automation solutions to customers," commented Juan Carlos Soto, vice president of Global Market Development and Engineering at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "With this announcement, customers have even more hardware choices that leverage the Solaris OS and its proven scalability and performance to use Synopsys solutions to develop state of the art processors and ASICs."

    Physical effects of semiconductors are becoming more and more interrelated. Each design decision can create unintended consequences. In addition to the old problems generated by wire capacitance, engineers can no longer manually balance the myriad effects such as leakage current, inductive noise or IR drop. Manufacturing processes and environmental variation can render your functional chip useless or economically unviable. Market forces are creating demands of higher volumes at lower and lower price points.

    "Our leading-edge EDA tool families' broad support for Solaris 10 on x86_64 processors offers our customers more choice and flexibility in the compute platforms available for SoC design," said Rich Goldman, vice president of Corporate Marketing and Strategic Market Development at Synopsys. "Our customers value the ability to choose optimal combinations of operating systems and hardware on which to execute our state-of-the-art product suites."