ASC Releases Free ALF Parser

New tool expected to encourage use of the Advanced Library Format standard for electronic circuit design and production

November 12, 2001, Windham, New Hampshire - Electronic design automation research and tool development firm Alternative System Concepts, Inc. (ASC) today announced that it is making available a free parser for ALF, the Advanced Library Format for defining integrated circuit libraries.

Nearing approval as IEEE standard 1603, ALF provides a long awaited single common library format suitable for use with EDA tools at all levels of the development process (see www.eda.org/alf for more details). While the benefits of ALF have been known for some time, its use by library vendors and commercial tool vendors has been slow to come. ASC is finding that customers are getting tired of waiting, as evidenced by the position of ASC
partner NEC:

"NEC has selected the ALF standard as the best way to describe sign-off worthy signal integrity, timing and power models at many levels of abstraction from RTL to tape-out. There is clearly no alternative that can match the capabilities of ALF. Therefore we are working with several EDA vendors on the development and deployment of ALF-compliant tools."
- Wolfgang Roethig, Senior Engineering Manager, NEC Electronics

ASC's free ALF Parser is a commercial-quality tool that performs the initial function needed in any ALF-related process, checking for and reporting any syntactic or semantic errors in a standard ALF 2.0 description. Making it free is expected to facilitate the efforts of other tool vendors in developing ALF tools, to encourage the adoption of ALF by commercial library vendors, and to support the evaluation of ALF by eventual end users.

"We recognized that foundry-specific cell libraries are inadequate for behavioral synthesis, as in our new low power optimization tool," said Jake Karrfalt, president of ASC. "When our engineers discovered ALF, we quickly determined that it provides the power characterization we've been looking for. It also gets around the problem of proprietary formats that restrict interoperability with downstream RTL tools."

ASC has been working with several other industry leaders to develop the IEEE standard for ALF. Accellera approved ALF to be sent to the IEEE as a standard. "I applaud the pioneering spirit of ASC to move forward to develop a parser for ALF," remarked Accellera chairman Dennis Brophy, Model Technology's director of strategic business development. "Putting the ASC parser in the hands of as many developers as possible will hasten the discovery of any operational issues in time to correct the ALF language before final IEEE balloting next May."

About the Free ALF Parser

Developed as part of ASC's longer-term low power optimization project, the free ALF Parser will also be a part of ASC's upcoming line of specialized products for EDA developers.

The ALF Parser software and documentation will be available for download from the ASC Web site (www.ascinc.com) starting November 19, 2001. There is no cost for the unsupported Parser, but in the spirit of building the ALF community, users downloading the tool will first be asked to pledge their contribution of at least one ALF library test case to the growing public ALF test suite.

About ASC

Alternative System Concepts Inc. is a privately-owned company that performs funded basic research and advanced product development for electronic design automation. Focusing on the higher levels of design abstraction, the company's projects include low-power optimization, virtual rad-hard design, XML-based tool integration, testability synthesis, and HDL translation. ASC is located in southern New Hampshire near Boston and works with distributors around the world.

Alternative System Concepts, Inc.
22 Haverhill Road, P.O. Box 128, Windham, NH 03087
Phone: (603) 437-2234 Fax: (603) 437-2722
www.ascinc.com - info@ascinc.com