SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Claiming a technology breakthrough with its full-wave 3D extraction technology, Optimal Corp. is gearing up to provide a suite of signal-integrity analysis solutions for chips, packages and pc-boards.
The company claims its solutions will provide an unprecedented combination of speed, accuracy and ease of use.
Optimal was founded in 1995, but has been in "stealth" mode until now, said An-Yu Kuo, cofounder and president. The company originally researched packaging technology under an Air Force contract. From this research came PakSi-TM, a thermal modeling tool for packages, and PakSi-E, a 3D RLCG (resistance, inductance, capacitance, conductance) extraction tool for packages.
Armed with third-round funding, Optimal this year released PakSi-Wave, a 3D full-wave extraction tool, and Sidea, a suite of utilities that convert s-parameters to Spice decks or transmission lines. Later this year, Optimal plans to release quasi-static and full-wave pc-board extraction tools, which will be followed by quasi-static and full-wave IC extraction tools.
While the technology is complex, ease of use is a guiding principle. "We feel that most extraction tools, most signal integrity tools, are too difficult for designers," said Kuo. "We want to make it like Quicken is for accounting—tools for people without a signal integrity background."
Optimal today employs 20 people, and boasts customers such as Xilinx, Agere, LSI Logic, Intel and Apple Computer for its initial packaging tools. Ying Chang, executive vice president, was a key developer of the Arcadia IC extraction tool created by Archer Systems. Ching-Chao Huang, chief technology officer, was an R&D manager at Rambus and TMA.
While the company has extraction and packaging expertise, what sets it apart is its fast full-wave extraction technology, Kuo said. Today, he noted, most extractors are quasi-static, meaning they don't solve the displacement current portion of Maxwell's equations. Full-wave electromagnetic solvers do so, and are thus more accurate, taking into account such effects as leaky substrates. But they're typically extremely slow.
Not so at Optimal, Kuo claimed. "Our technology is an order of magnitude faster than most research code," he said. As an example, he noted that a full-wave, 3D extraction on a low-pass filter with about 50,000 elements took 24 minutes on an 800 MHz Pentium 3 PC—with a frequency sweep of 0 to 20 GHz.
Kuo said Optimal has two engines—quasi-static and full wave—and three interfaces, one each for packages, ICs and pc-boards. PakSi-E is quasi-static and PakSi-Wave is full wave. Similarly, in September, Optimal will release PCB-E and PCB-Wave, to be followed next year by IC-E and IC-Wave.
"Optimal will become the first company to offer integrated, 3D full wave, signal integrity solutions for PCB, packaging and IC designs all together," Kuo said.
Optimal sells direct in the U.S. and Taiwan, and has distributors in Japan, Korea and Europe, Kuo said. The company mostly sells one-year, time-based licenses, with most prices in the $10,000 to $20,000 range.
