Elastix Corporation, with research and development (R&D) offices here, today announced its intent to be the first electronic design automation (EDA) provider to automatically generate variability-aware asynchronous implementations of synchronous, digital integrated circuit (IC) designs.
“Variability-aware asynchronous designs are ideal for low-energy consumption, high-performance, and ease of architecture and implementation of large chips,” says Vigyan Singhal, chief executive officer and co-founder of Elastix. “Implementing asynchronous techniques has required manual design or significant and unacceptable changes to the standard ASIC design flow, making it an impractical methodology until now.”
For any synthesizable digital design, the Elastix design-for-variability (DFV) technology will be able to generate a functionally equivalent (asynchronous) physical implementation that responds automatically to variability, and self-adjusts according to process, voltage, temperature and logic conditions. It will work within a traditional application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) synchronous design flow, allowing digital chips to run at optimal energy efficiency, especially for multi-mode and multi-voltage designs. The technology will remove the need for design margins to account for worst-case variability effects and will offer design teams variability-aware gains.
The underlying technology has been licensed from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) Barcelona. “We are proud of technical innovations achieved by UPC and are pleased to work with Elastix to create a market opportunity for this innovation,” says Antoni Giró, the rector of UPC Barcelona. “We believe that the team of UPC and Elastix is one that has all the makings of revolutionizing the way in which IC design is done.”
Early versions of the software are in limited use with select customers. More details on the Elastix solution will be available later in 2008.
Funding, Founders, Advisors
Elastix has received seed funding from its founders and several Silicon Valley-based angel investors. It is in the process of raising its Series A financing to fund the development and marketing of the technology.
Singhal, previously founder and chief technology officer of Jasper Design Automation, founded Elastix in 2007 with Emre Tuncer and Jordi Cortadella. Tuncer, formerly a vice president of engineering at Magma Design Automation (Nasdaq: LAVA), is vice president of engineering. Cortadella, a professor at UPC Barcelona, is chief scientist.
The Elastix Academic Advisory Board consists of: Luciano Lavagno, professor at Politecnico di Torino in Italy; Sharad Malik, professor at Princeton University; Antonio Ortega, professor at University of Southern California; Sachin Sapatnekar, professor at University of Minnesota; and Alex Yakovlev, professor at Newcastle University of the United Kingdom.
Malik, a veteran of previous EDA start-ups, explains: “Device variability is seriously threatening future benefits of technology scaling. Elastix is providing a low-cost, high-benefit solution with little change to existing flows.”
About Elastix Corporation
Elastix is developing solutions to build elastic implementations of digital designs. The Elastix products implement energy-efficient, variability-aware IC designs in a traditional, synchronous design tool flow. Elastix has offices in Barcelona, Spain, and Santa Clara, Calif. For more information, send email to info@elastix-corp.com