EDA tool accelerates place and route for SOCs
Mike Demler, Technical Editor -- EDN, January 20, 2011
Magma Design Automation claims that its new Talus Vortex FX IC-implementation tool is the first to employ distributed computing for acceleration of placement and routing in SOCs (systems on chips). The company has also announced Talus 1.2, which integrates routing, timing analysis, and parasitic extraction to triple flat-block capacity to 3 million gates from the 1 million-gate capacity of Talus 1.1.
According to Bob Smith, vice president of product marketing at Magma, Talus Vortex FX’s Distributed Smart Sync technology provides a threefold performance boost onto the improvements in stand-alone multithreaded capability of Talus 1.2 on a single server. On its own, the new Talus 1.2 system enables engineers to implement 1 million cells per day and perform crosstalk avoidance to detect and correct crosstalk violations during optimization and implementation, advanced on-chip variation to ensure tight timing correlation throughout the flow, and MMMC (multimode/multicorner) analysis to manage multiple timing scenarios.Talus 1.2 is currently in use for 28-nm designs at five large semiconductor companies, according to Smith, and the company has silicon-proved the product in tape-outs at the 40-nm node.
The Talus MX timing-and-extraction engines borrow technology from Magma’s Tekton timing analyzer, and QCP sign-off extractor. It also features the Talus MX Router with enhanced global, tracking and detailed routing capabilities.
The Magma Hydra design-partitioning and floorplanning tool provides the design input to Talus Vortex FX, which Magma licenses separately, to manage the distribution of parallel Talus place-and-route jobs across typically as many as 10 to 12 servers. To leverage the advantages of distributed computing, you must ensure that each server has an individual license available for the Talus 1.2 product. A typical hardware configuration uses servers with four to eight processor cores and 64 Gbytes of memory. During execution, Vortex FX synchronizes and aggregates the results of each Talus process to assemble the complete SOC.
Magma Design Automation
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