Solution-Soft Announces General Availability of gdzip™ and mezip™
Santa Clara, Calif., December 6, 2002 – Solution-Soft Systems, Inc., a global leader in virtual clock and time travel testing solutions today announced the general release of gdzipTM and mezipTM, specialized file compressors for GDSII and MEBES file formats. The GDSII stream is the standard exchange format between the design world and the mask shops. The MEBES format is the most commonly used format for the electron beam lithography and photomask production.
Semiconductor design files are becoming larger almost daily as their feature sets grow. The use of tools such as Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) further expands the size. It is now common to have designs in the Gigabyte (GB) range for both GDSII and MEBES files. In 2002, the maximum MEBES data volume for a single layer was about 100 GB this is predicted to double over the next two years.
Fabless design houses, foundries, mask shops and tool vendors send and receive numerous design files, in these formats, daily while maintaining legacy versions of each. The sheer size of these GDSII and MEBES files causes issues in file transfer, manipulation, and storage.
Achieving compression ratios of 2-to-10 times more than any other available solution, gdzip and mezip significantly reduce the transfer time and storage requirement for users of these file types. Issues that in the past increased the tape out cycle time, such as prolonged large file transfers are relieved. Decreasing the file size also provides the benefits of reducing the disk capacity needed to store design files and allowing for greater reliability of transmission, as the likelihood of errors and line drops diminishes.
“Our compressors for GDSII and MEBES files have achieved great success in the semiconductor industry. We currently have numerous installations from the worlds largest chip foundries, which both use and promote our product to their tape out customers, to a large of number of mask shops and many chip design houses.” said Paul Wang, CTO at Solution-Soft. “Our most recent move to extend the markets for our products has been the development of an Application Programming Interface (API) set for both of these compressors at the request of various EDA and EB writer vendors. This API allows tool vendors to access compressed files at run time while leaving the files compressed on disk. The files can now remain compressed throughout the workflow: design rule checking, CATS, OPC, viewer, and EB writer, enabling greater transportability and storability of the designs.”
About Solution-Soft
The Leader in Virtual Clock and Time Travel Testing Solutions
Since 1997, Solution-Soft has been at the forefront of virtual clock software and time travel testing solutions, empowering organizations in the ever-evolving digital world. Our flagship product, Time Machine, has revolutionized application testing, enabling thousands of companies, including 47 of the Fortune 100 US companies, to reduce costs and accelerate project delivery by an average of 3 – 10 times across traditional systems and containerized applications.
The Time Machine Product Suite extends these capabilities, optimizing cloud migration, test automation, Agile/DevOps, and containerization testing. Our latest innovation, Time Machine for Containers, supports standalone Docker containers and large-scale Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters (including a 16,000+ CPU core, 1,300+ namespace deployments).
Trusted by over 2,000 customers worldwide across diverse industries (including 3M, AMEX, BBC, Boeing, and more) and partnered with industry leaders like Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat, Solution-Soft, founded in 1993 and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, provides cutting-edge solutions for your time-sensitive testing needs. Learn more at www.solution-soft.com or call +1.408.346.1400.
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