Azuro Strengthens Leadership in Timing Optimization

SANTA CLARA, CA – June 14, 2010 – Azuro, Inc., the provider of advanced clock and timing optimization tools for digital chip design, today announced version 1.4 of Rubix™, the company’s industry-leading clock concurrent optimization tool. This release deploys extensive refinements to the product’s underlying timing-driven placement, logic sizing, and useful skew-based clock tree synthesis algorithms, resulting in an average 15% increase in clock frequencies beyond traditional skew-balanced flows, 5% higher than the previous version of Rubix. The product also includes full support for version 1.1 of the Common Power Format (CPF).

“Rubix continues to build momentum within our existing customer base and also through several new customer engagements,” said Paul Cunningham CEO of Azuro. “At 40 and 28nm, building clocks to deliver the best timing rather than to be skew balanced is becoming a must-have to meet schedules and manage power consumption. With this new release of Rubix we are seeing yet further improvements in our already significant clock speed gains, even on high performance CPUs and GPUs. These improvements typically come with impressive 10 to 30% reductions in leakage power as well.”

Clock concurrent optimization is a new approach to clock tree synthesis which builds useful skew-based clocks concurrently with performing logic gate sizing and placement. The key defining characteristic of clock concurrent optimization is that the timing picture being considered by all its underlying algorithms is a true “propagated clocks” view of timing based on real propagation of clock signals through the clock network. For more information on clock concurrent optimization, see the white paper at www.azuro.com/rubix/white-paper.html

CPF support in Rubix 1.4 follows on from the company’s announcement of its membership into the Cadence Connections program in March (see www.azuro.com/news/pr_2010_03_03.html ). Rubix 1.4 is available now and is already in production use at several of Azuro’s largest customers.

About Rubix™

Rubix is a unified placement, sizing, and useful skew-based clock tree synthesis tool for digital standard cell-based chip designs. It increases clock frequencies by up to 25%, reduces leakage power by up to 30%, and accelerates timing closure in the backend of the design flow by up to two months.

About Azuro

Azuro is an electronic design automation company supplying software tools for use designing digital semiconductor chips. The company's unique clock and timing optimization technologies make chips faster, reduce chip power and dramatically accelerate chip time to market. Founded in 2002, the company is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA with R&D in Cambridge, UK, and is privately held. For additional information, visit www.azuro.com/