ATI Implements Award-winning Radeon X800 Series with Cadence Encounter

Cadence Encounter Digital IC Design Platform Delivers First Pass Silicon and Fast Time-to-Market for Complex Leading-Edge Design

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. today announced that the Cadence® Encounter™ digital IC design platform has helped ATI Technologies Inc. implement the world's fastest, most powerful visual processor technology. Using the Cadence Encounter technologies in combination with its first-class design team, ATI achieved first pass silicon success of its critically-acclaimed Radeon X800 family of high-speed graphics chips, while besting previous industry records for performance, power efficiency, and compactness.

ATI employed the Encounter solution as it set a new standard in graphics performance and visual realism with its nanometer-scale, 520 MHz, 160-million-plus transistor hierarchical Visual Processing Unit. Signal integrity (SI) and timing closure, coupled with ease of use and significant savings in design time, made the Encounter platform's production-proven new-generation technology the choice to deliver a faster route to silicon.

"The combination of NanoRoute™ and CeltIC™ technologies gave my team the speed, capacity, and quality of results required to reach this landmark achievement," said Bob Patel, director of engineering at ATI. "We were especially impressed with NanoRoute's SMART routing technology and its ability to dramatically reduce the SI violations reported by CeltIC, while preserving the timing predicted in prototyping."

"Through proprietary design techniques and the Encounter platform technologies, we were able to achieve an extremely compact and power efficient design that has set new industry records for performance," said Greg Buchner, vice president of engineering at ATI. "The X800 design is the most aggressive and complex visual processing technology in ATI's history, and without the support of Cadence and the technologies of the Encounter platform, we would not be in the award-winning position we enjoy today."

"We heartily congratulate ATI on the success of the Radeon X800 series and are pleased that the capabilities of the Encounter platform provided ATI with the ability to meet their most complex design challenges," said Wei-Jin Dai, platform vice president, digital IC implementation at Cadence. "With continued customer successes such as this, the Encounter platform further extends its lead in digital IC implementation."

The original press release can be found here.