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Tools and layout libraries of the Alliance package

Every Alliance tool has been designed to simply interface with each other, in order to support the proposed design flow. Nevertheless, each tool can also be used independently, thanks to the multiple standard formats used for input and output files.

One of the most important characteristics of the Alliance system is that it provides a common internal data structure to represent the three basic views of a chip:

Figure 1 details how all the Alliance tools are linked together around the basic behavioral, structural and physical data structures.

Figure 1: How the tools are linked on the data structures.
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The process independence goal is achieved with a thin fixed-grid symbolic layout approach. All the library of the system use this approach successfully. Layouts have been targetted to ES2 2$\mu$m, 1.5$\mu$m, 1.2$\mu$m, 1.0$\mu$m and 0.7$\mu$m technologies, the AMS 1.2$\mu$m technology and SGS-Thomson 0.5$\mu$m technology. Chips have been fabricated successfully through the CMP services on these technologies.



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