Power Integrity with Sigrity, Inc.

August 29, 2005

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by Jack Horgan - Contributing Editor
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I had an opportunity recently to follow up my DAC interview with a phone conversation with Teo Yatman

How long have you been at Sigrity?

I've been here a little over 4 years now. For the EDA industry that's pretty long.

What's your role at the company?

My role is business development and international sales. I started as VP of Sales but we really needed some focus on business development. Our president wanted me to help the company in terms of visibility in the marketplace and partnerships with EDA players, am more active role with partners and major customers. I also manage international sales directly. There is a director of sales here that I work with closely. He handles the direct sales in North America. It's a small company so we tend to do a lot of things. I do a little bit of marketing PR activity. But as we grow we are definitely looking to add resource in marketing. We have had a direct sales team on board for a few years

now: We have an office here I Santa Cruz. A couple of years ago we opened in office in Boston and this year we opened an office in Austin, Texas. This will be the steady state in North America for a while. Internationally, I have reps in Germany, Israel, India, mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea and of course Japan. That keeps me pretty busy.

What challenges does having international reps present so far from headquarters present?

The major challenge for our reps is that our solutions are very technical in nature. We typically address the higher end of the market for high speed design be it package or be it board and now we are getting into chips. Having technical support in the field internationally has been a challenge. We've been very focused on making sure that we've hired the right kind of rep who has the customer relationships to help the business side and also a team of application engineers, the technical resources that can help support the customer because we expect the first tier support to be out in the field. We in turn support the reps of course but not the customers directly internationally. We

expect them to be the support channel for our customers. A lot of our tools come from an electromagnetic background if you go back to the beginnings of our company with our founder, Jiayuan Fang, at SUNY Binghamton. Electromagnetics is sort of the backbone of our company. We need to find people and there are not a lot of people out there who know this space very well. Japan has done very well, Asia also. Europe is a more slowly developing market. Our challenge now is to expand. Our next expansion will be in Europe.

Still with third party reps?

Yes, although we are definitely reaching a point in some areas where it makes sense to consider going direct in terms of ensuring our growth, especially as we are moving to new markets with CoDesign Studio product. We may determine that a direct presence is better suited for the future.

CoDesign was introduced a little before DAC. What has been the response?

We introduced the product in May. The response has been very good. We actually have several customers signed up for evaluations and hopefully purchases soon thereafter. Very active opportunities in the works in Japan, a major semiconductor company there. In Germany and several accounts in the US. There are probably a half dozen opportunities we are working on right now with CoDesign Studio. We are hoping that it's going to be a great product for us down the road because the nature of the problem is quickly getting to where chip analysis is of itself not adequate. They've got to take into consideration the package effects. We see more and more that it is becoming an issue at major

companies. We feel that we are in a great position to address that problem with our solution set.

Where does the product fit into the design flow?

Two places! One is in the pre-layout planning phase which clearly gives the customers a lot of what-if capability, being able to look at different type of packages and power configurations and to optimize that during the pre-layout phase. Also more or less a signoff in the post layout phase once the chip and package have been laid out, you can run the analysis tool to see the interaction between the two.

What does one vary during the pre-layout phase?

It could be the power plan or it could be decoupling capacitors to be palaced on the chip, the package or even on the board. But most of our customers are looking at the chip-package interface.

With our EDA partners we are positioning this capability in major IC flows such as Synopsys, Cadence and Magma. The first two are our partners. We try to work very closely, especially with customers using their design flows, to find out how to best optimize that capability.

You can run simulations of different packages to see the effect it has particularly in the power delivery network. This is a major area we are looking at.

We work closely with Amkor who is a major package supplier. They had a press release announcing that they would be working with us to come up with a template where customers can enter in different design parameters. They would then come back with a package configuration and they could simulate that with our Speed2000 tool. We are working on multiple fronts. Working with EDA players like Synopsys and package suppliers like Amkor. We are also in discussions with folks like TSMC to address the whole reference flow question.

Amkor is a major supplier of packages for a lot of fabless companies that are not designing their own packages. Amkor will do the package design. They will supply different package configurations that will meet the customer requirements. The key here is that we can analyze different package configurations and do what-if considerations of those packages, optimizing the package and chip power delivery performance. The whole idea is to be able to avoid costly respins down the road.

What we found with major customers is that they feel that they've got the package side down separately and the chip side done separately. But when they put it all together, problems come up in the power delivery system. We are trying to avoid those sorts of surprises after the fact and give customers the opportunity to analyze the electrical performance of the power delivery system. That's the whole idea behind CoDesign Studio.

Have these fables companies been flying blind in terms of their package selection?

Companies would have a list of criteria that that they would provide to let's say Amkor and say here is the kind of chip and here is the kind of package we need. Help us with the package design. The templates available for package design.

We can simulate them so that the customer has an opportunity to select the best package for his design. We are trying to give them a look ahead as early as possible in the design cycle.

Is there any change in methodology or training required to use this tool?

More and more especially the higher end customers have got teams of people working on power delivery systems for both chip and packages. They have to know about the chip, they have to know about the package. No more over the fence kind of thing. I'm done with the chip, go find the right packaging. The chip and package people have to work closer together. There is definitely a bit of cross training involved with this CoDesign solution. If we are going to put this in the hands of a chip designer, he will have to understand a bit more about package design and vice versa. More and more teams are being cross trained. Intel is an example. They have teams of people working on

power delivery systems. There is a lot more education being done between chip and packaging teams. Customers realize that they need to make this happen because it is not working the other way. It's not isolated design teams anymore.

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-- Jack Horgan, EDACafe.com Contributing Editor.

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