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Consolidation at design for manufacture startups |
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Feb 22, 2007 at 01:52 PM |
 Blaze DFM and Aprio Technologies have signed a letter of intent to ‘merge'. The combined company would operate as Blaze DFM. Aprio, founded in 2003, brings analysis and simulation engines into the Blaze product line of electrical semiconductor design for manufacturing (DFM) solutions. Not only is Aprio a recent company, Blaze was founded in 2004. The companies sell products to fabless, integrated device manufacturers and foundries. Financial terms of the agreement were not announced. The merger is expected to be finalized within the next few weeks.
"In the last couple of years, we've seen some DFM companies absorbed by either equipment manufacturers or by EDA companies," comments Jacob Jacobsson, president and CEO at Blaze. "We believe that a pure play DFM company, one that understands both design and manufacturing, adds significant value to the semiconductor eco-system." Jacobsson maintains that Blaze's booming business and the strength of Aprio's technology are propelling the merger.
The companies say that Aprio's litho simulation engine is unique in terms of accuracy and speed. These features are due to the simulation working incrementally. Some commercially available lithography simulation engines work with abstracted data for high speed, but are not accurate enough for checking that the design will operate to the required electrical specifications (which, after all, is the purpose of the exercise). Other engines are highly accurate but are too slow to be used during the design process, where many iterations are needed to get a working, effective product. Aprio's engine is claimed to be the only one that is both accurate enough and fast enough to meet the needs of a comprehensive electrical DFM solution.
Blaze's product line provides electrical analysis and optimization capabilities for modeling, prediction and compensation of systematic variations in advanced silicon process technologies. The aim is tighter control over process variation and dramatic improvements in parametric yield and time to volume production. This also lays the groundwork for future statistical analysis and optimization tools to extend these capabilities.
The merged company's headquarters will be at Blaze's current location in Sunnyvale, California, and Aprio's international offices in Japan and Taiwan will be retained. Blaze also has an office in San Diego.
A competitor offered a somewhat different view. Wolf Staud, Director of Marketing at Invarium (founded 2003), sees the move as part of the general consolidation necessary for start-ups to gain the critical mass needed for credibility with the larger fabless companies. This will be a feature of the coming year, maintains Staud. "The large EDA companies, which are still trailing in terms of technology in some of the niche applications, will be gobbling up some of the startups too," he believes. Invarium provides what it calls "process and proximity compensation". Staud maintains (unsurprisingly) that "Invarium has the most advanced, rigorous modeling technology in the marketplace, giving us a strong lead on modeling double patterning which is becoming the mainstay lithography technology for 32nm."
By Dr Mike Cooke
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