Overview

The Next Level

Fully custom silicon that wins in the market requires more than the latest EDA tools, since the competition is also using those tools.  Open-Silicon has invested in R&D to create a series of products called the MAX Technologies to allow customers to take their design to the next level. PowerMAX™ focuses on technologies to optimize dynamic and static power consumption. CoreMAX™ is about building the fastest processors in the ASIC world. VariMAX™ brings back biasing down from the 100 million unit design space and makes that technology available to ASIC customers today.  With VariMAX customers can manage process variation and save power, increase yields, and improve performance.  Finally, TestMAX™ is about lowering test time and, when combined with Open-Silicon's already low test equipment costs, achieving the lowest production test cost structure possible.

Zenasis Technologies

Open-Silicon's MAX Technologies were boosted by the 2007 acquisition of Zenasis Technologies, a startup EDA company focused on the processor optimization space. That brought to Open-Silicon the combined talents of some of the industry's most senior processor physical designers, with the combined experience from over 50 processor implementations. In addition, the Zenasis tools, over 2 million lines of C++ code, were integrated into the Open-Silicon methodology to enable custom cell creation for optimal power and performance.

Back Biasing

The big issue in the ’90s was performance. That concern gave way to a focus on power as the top problem for the early 2000s. Now, it is time to confront the chief villain of today: variability. Lithography limitations and atomistic doping mean that performance and leakage power now vary tremendously across otherwise good die. Your choice at leading technology nodes is to either tune the silicon to tighten the distribution or put a painful screen in place and throw out a lot of defect-free devices for being parametrically out of bounds.

Open-Silicon has addressed this with VariMAX's back biasing technology.  Back biasing, or reverse body biasing, is not a new technique, but the effort to add biasing to designs traditionally limited it to ultra high volume markets like cell phones.  Open-Silicon's VariMAX brings that technology to the ASIC world, enabling customers in many markets to now enjoy that same optimum level of power consumption and yield enhancement.  Through automation and methodology, the technology can now be employed by Open-Silicon's customers today.

Patent Portfolio

Open-Silicon's MAX specific patents include:

  • 7,225,423 - Design-specific on-the-fly cells (Method for automated design of integrated circuits with targeted quality objectives using dynamically generated building blocks)
  • 7,003,738 - Mapper (Process for automated generation of design-specific complex functional blocks to improve quality of synthesized digital integrated circuits in CMOS using altering process
  • 6,938,223 - ZenMOS (Logic circuit having a functionally redundant transistor network)
  • 6,782,514 - Uniquification & characterization (Context-sensitive constraint driven uniquification and characterization of standard cells)