Blaze DFM Bursts onto Scene with Product, Customers and Silicon Success
New company leads the way with high-impact electrical DFM solutions
SUNNYVALE, Calif. – May 15, 2006 – The future of design for manufacturing (DFM) for semiconductors has arrived and startup Blaze DFM, Inc. (Blaze) is leading the way. The company, co-founded by DFM pioneer Dr. Andrew Kahng, was formed in 2004 to provide DFM solutions with meaningful bottom-line impact. Going far beyond just providing yield models or DFM reports, Blaze delivers tools that enable designers to get the most out of advanced process technologies. According to Jacob Jacobsson, president and CEO at Blaze, “The economic benefit of DFM technology can be enormous. Blaze customers expect to add tens of millions of dollars to their bottom line from better parametric yield and shorter time to volume manufacturing.” Accordingly, Blaze engineers worked closely with leading semiconductor design teams and foundries during the company’s two-year product development stage to prove the value of the company’s ‘electrical DFM’ technology in production customer designs.
Electrical DFM
Electrical DFM solutions eclipse the “shape-centric” DFM tools from other vendors by providing significant gains in parametric yield, reduced power, and improved performance for sub-100nm process technologies. Unlike earlier DFM approaches, which are primarily geometric in nature or passive reporting tools, electrical DFM uses design intent information (such as timing constraints) to drive a manufacturing-aware optimization of the design-to-manufacturing interface. Electrical DFM, the basis of Blaze technology, is based on the pioneering research of Professor Kahng and his group at the University of California, San Diego, to which Blaze has obtained exclusive licenses via UC San Diego’s office of Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Services.
“DFM has been my focus for nearly a decade and now, at the 90nm and 65nm nodes, manufacturing challenges have become acute,” said Dr. Andrew Kahng, co-founder, chairman, and chief technologist at Blaze. “Today, I see a lot of effort and resources directed at minor improvements to existing solutions, but this misses the point. As an industry, we should be striving for major, groundbreaking advancements – literally entire technology nodes of cost and ROI improvements - rather than settling for a few percentage points in incremental yield gains.”
“Thanks to Andrew and his distinguished team, cutting-edge DFM research at UCSD is being put to practical uses", said Dr. Alan Paau, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Services at UCSD. “We are delighted by the progress Blaze has made in commercializing this research for application by the semiconductor industry.”
Product, Customers and Silicon Success
Blaze DFM’s newly announced product, Blaze MO™ optimization software, automatically optimizes designs for manufacturing based on power and timing requirements without requiring significant changes to the design flow or to the handoff to manufacturing (see companion press release).
Early customers for Blaze MO include leading foundries, large fabless semiconductor companies and IDMs. Collectively, Blaze MO customers have validated the product on more than a dozen production design blocks and in silicon at three major foundries.
Blaze technology has been extensively validated during the development and beta-test period. This validation included SPICE-level testing on a wide range of 90nm and 65nm process technologies from more than ten semiconductor companies; extensive litho simulation studies; and detailed silicon studies using proprietary test chips and commonly-used IP cores (including dose-exposure skews and SEM measurements).Validation testing culminated in “A-B” silicon fabrication of a complex 90nm production SoC design. (“A-B” silicon results directly compare Blaze-optimized and production versions of a design by writing both versions side-by-side on the same reticle.)
The Management Team
Blaze DFM was founded in 2004 by Kahng, Dave Reed, and Puneet Gupta and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. The company has raised over $8 million to date, with a Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in the Fall of 2004. Company leadership includes Kahng, Jacobsson, Blaze DFM’s newly announced CEO, and Reed, vice president of marketing and business development. Kahng is currently on leave from his position as Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at UC San Diego. Jacobsson has held CEO positions at Forte Systems and SCS Corp., and executive positions at Xilinx, Cadence, and Daisy. He currently serves on the board of directors at Actel Corp. and various privately held companies. Reed has over 20 years of experience building startups into successful enterprises with companies such as Cadence, Cooper & Chyan Technology, and Tangent Systems. Gupta currently serves as the company’s product architect.
About Blaze DFM
Blaze DFM provides software solutions to fabless semiconductor companies, integrated device manufacturers, and silicon foundries. Blaze products give IC designers greater control over manufacturing variability, improving yield and shortening time to volume production. Blaze DFM, Inc., 1275 Orleans Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089, 408.470.4900. Web: http://www.blaze-dfm.com
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