SANTA CLARA, Calif. - October 14, 2005 - S3 Graphics, a Via Technologies joint venture company, has adopted Sequence Design's CoolTime for dynamic voltage drop analysis and optimization of its next-generation 90nm products.

CoolTime has displaced competing power-grid analysis tools according Michael Shiuan, vice president of engineering for S3 Graphics. "CoolTime demonstrated excellent improvement in voltage drop with significantly fewer decoupling capacitors on our high-end graphics processor without impacting timing or signal integrity," he said.

Shiuan added that CoolTime offers S3 significant accuracy and time-to-market advantages as it is the only tool with integrated timing and signal-integrity engines, and is highly integrated with the company's existing Cadence and Synopsys flows. "Due to the good results demonstrated by CoolTime, we are planning to use it for our next-generation, multimillion gate design," Shiuan said.

CoolTime replaces point analysis tools that can only analyze one electrical effect at a time. By integrating the analysis of power, electromigration, voltage drop, timing, and signal integrity into a concurrent database, it reduces design and analysis iterations up to four times. As a signoff solution independent of the design implementation tools, CoolTime enables designers to signoff with confidence and ensure first-silicon success. CoolTime has proven accuracy with silicon and SPICE, and the performance and capacity to handle multimillion gate designs, thus making it an ideal signoff solution for nanometer SoC designs.

"World-class companies such as S3 are confronting mounting challenges with low-power design at 90nm and below," said Vic Kulkarni, president and CEO of Sequence Design. "With CoolTime, we are providing industry-leading technology to tackle the concurrent issues of voltage drop, power, timing, and signal integrity to ensure rapid signoff with no impact on quality or time to market."

• Simulation-based and vectorless analysis modes for voltage drop
• Accuracy within 5% of SPICE; Capacity to handle <25M gate designs
• Accurate RLC model includes power grid, decap, package, signal, and intrinsic cell parasitics
• High-speed embedded extractor uses silicon-proven Columbus-NTX™ technology
• Cell characterization for transient current waveforms, Accuwave™
• Accurate memory and macro current modeling
• Power grid IR-drop and EM analysis
• Virtual rail voltage and recovery time analysis for MTCMOS power gated designs
• Event-based timing and SI analysis for crosstalk and voltage-drop effects
• Pre-route analysis and post-route verification
• Hierarchical analysis for SoC designs
• Cell characterization for voltage-aware timing and SI modeling
• Easy-to-use graphical interface and detailed reports
• Shared platform with PhysicalStudio optimization
• Correlated with silicon and industry-standard circuit simulators
• Available on 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris and Linux (Opteron) platforms
• For more information and data sheet: Click Here

About S3 Graphics

S3 Graphics Co., Ltd., a VIA Technologies joint venture company, is a leading supplier to the 3D enabled PC graphics market it pioneered. Today, S3 Graphics ships high performance consumer graphics cards to desktop board manufacturers and low power, high performance, Commercial Grade 3D graphics sub-systems to top tier notebook manufacturers. In addition, S3 Graphics integrates market-leading chipset technology from VIA Technologies, Inc. into shared memory architecture products for the high volume, value PC market. S3 Graphics has a long-term commitment to top performance, quality and state of-the-art features for desktop and mobile applications. Additional information can be found at the Company's website at s3graphics.com.

About Sequence

Sequence Design, Inc. enables system-on-chip designers to bring higher-performance and power-aware nanometer integrated circuits quickly to fabrication. Sequence's power and signal- integrity software give its more than 125 customers the competitive advantage necessary to excel in aggressive technology markets, despite demanding complexity and time-to-market issues of nanometer design.

Sequence has worldwide development and field service operations. The company was recently named by Reed Electronics as one of the top 10 companies to watch in the electronics industry. Sequence is privately held. Sequence is a member of the ARM/Artisan Connected Community™ , Cadence Design Systems' Connections™, Mentor Graphics' Open Door™, and Virage Logic VIP™ partnership programs. Additional information is available at sequencedesign.com.