October 19, 2004 -- Stone Pillar Technologies, Inc. announced today that Micrel, Inc., a manufacturer of communications, clock management, Ethernet switch and physical layer transceivers, mixed signal, analog, and power ICs, has adopted the DesignRuleBuilder component of the Silicon Insight toolkit for semiconductor technology development.

Silicon Insight DesignRuleBuilder automates generation of intelligent design rules to speed runset creation, reduces the learning curve for supported DRC/LVS tools, and provides support for multiple targeted tools from a single rule set.

Technology development for advanced power semiconductor devices requires extremely complex design rules that must be flexible enough to accommodate rule variations based on device geometries, voltages, and applications. The large engineering investment for manually creating such rule sets makes it impractical to support multiple DRC/LVS(design rule checker / layout versus schematic) tools. By providing a convenient GUI-based interface for rule creation, DesignRuleBuilder enables engineers to speed up runset creation and focus on the creation of high quality rules, rather than learning details of command language specific to individual DRC/LVS tools.