Orora Awarded $1.5M New DoD Contract for Silicon-Accurate Behavioral Modeling
Redmond, WA, June 18, 2006 — Orora Design Technologies, Inc., an emerging leader in analog design automation software, today announced that Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) have selected Orora Design Technologies amongst competing companies to receive a $1.5 million contract to develop software for automated generation of silicon-accurate behavioral models for radiation-hardened mixed-signal System on Chip electronic circuits. A total of $5M DoD research contracts have been awarded to Orora for developing custom electronic design automation technologies that meet the DoD needs.
With the microelectronics industry rapidly moving to sub-100 nanometer CMOS processes, single-event upsets caused by radiation are becoming a daunting design issue. How to efficiently and accurately predict how single-event upsets and dose related effects can affect the system performance and reliability is critical to space and defense electronics. Running Spice-like simulators and computing intensive technology computer aided design (TCAD) tools is time prohibitive even with computing farms. Orora Design Technologies is pioneering automatic generation and calibration of compact behavioral models to deliver 100x to 1000x speed up over the SPICE & TCAD based approaches to make full chip radiation performance characterization a reality.
Orora’s Arana behavioral modeling platform is the first of its kind in industry to provide automated behavioral model generation directly from netlists or schematics. This capability coupled with full integration into the Cadence Design Environment is accelerating industry-wide acceptance of behavioral modeling in the design process.
The scope of the AFRL/DTRA contract is to extend Orora’s Arana behavioral modeling capability to generate accurate high-level models of transistor-level circuits incorporating radiation effects. The specific focus will be on providing accurate automatically generated behavioral models for high-resolution high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs).
“With the capacity of silicon-accurate behavioral models for radiation-hardened electronics, we expect a quantum jump in the design and synthesis of radiation-hardened mixed-signal electronics.” said US Air Force Captain Troy Uhlman, Program Manager for Radiation-Hardened Electronics at Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
