Solution-Soft Releases gdzipTM Version 2.0

Santa Clara, Calif., May 12, 2003 – Solution-Soft Systems, Inc., a global leader in virtual clock and time travel testing solutions, today announced the general release of gdzipTM 2.0, a specialized file compressor for the GDSII file format.  The GDSII stream is the standard exchange format between the design world and the mask shops.  This latest release achieves compression ratios 2-to-15 times more than any other available solution, a 30 percent improvement over version one.  Additionally, time to compress has been reduced, on average, by 10 percent.       

GDSII is one of the most prevalent file types used by semiconductor companies in the creation of chip designs.   Year after year the number of functions embedded in a typical semiconductor has expanded.  This has likewise resulted in an expansion of the design files used to create the chips, with many designs in the Gigabyte (GB) range.   The addition of Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) further expands the resulting file size. 

As a chip design progresses it passes through many hands and across a multitude of systems on its way to final production.  Initially it may begin at the workstation of an engineer in a fabless design house then be sent to, or accessed by, other engineers internally as they complete the final design.   When the software-based design has successfully passed significant internal processes the chip design house will send the files for the design to a mask shop or chip foundry to begin the process of making the physical semiconductor chip.  In the industry this process is called “Tape-Out”, a legacy term carried over from the days when the files had to be written to magnetic tape and physically sent via courier to the mask shop or foundry.  Today, practically every semiconductor company uses the Internet to accomplish this task to help meet their time-to-market demands.

Solution-Soft’s gdzip significantly reduces transfer time and storage requirements for GDSII files

In between all these steps, gdzip reduces the time delay of getting the files where they need to be.  The tremendous size of GDSII files alone can cause problems when transferring to another site.  Users can experience long-delays as well as line failures during the transfer.  Reducing the size of the files with gdzip frees the tape-out engineer from the tedious task of monitoring the transfer for an excessively long time as well as limiting the possibility of connection failures with the shortened transfer cycle.  Long term, gdzip provides a significant savings in storage by diminishing the size of each version of every design that companies will archive.  

“Solution-Soft’s customers are very pleased with the performance level we’ve been able to achieve in this latest version of gdzip.” said Paul Wang, CTO at Solution-Soft.  “Our install base covers nearly every one of the worlds largest chip foundries and mask shops, many chip design houses as well as some EDA and EB writer vendors who interface with gdzip through our API to access compressed files at run time while leaving the files compressed on disk.  This release allows all of them to realize even greater transportability and storability of 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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