InTime Software has announced Time Planner for RTL planning and Time Builder, a hierarchical gate-level floorplanner, to complement its Time Architect product. The three products expand and enhance the concept of the silicon virtual prototype. Time Planner directly reads RTL and generates a physical floorplan without mapping to gates. It manages and handles a mix of design IP (intellectual property), RTL, and even partially finished RTL. Time Planner embeds a static-timing-analysis tool that quickly assesses timing issues at the RTL stage. Once you perform RTL timing analysis, you can explore and debug critical nets; the tool visually correlates nets on the floorplan and in the RTL. Time Planner then generates synthesis constraints together with logical, synthesis, and physical hierarchies.

Time Planner uses a proprietary morphing-placement system that shapes blocks during placement for best area usage. Other capabilities include global block placement, internal budgeting analysis, full-power routing, block assembly, I/O placement, and automatic partitioning for physical boundaries. Interactive capabilities include control over placement of top-level pins and definition of stripes and rings on macros to accommodate routing. Time Builder can use the floorplan that Time Planner generates as its starting point.

The Time Builder hierarchical, gate-level, chip-assembly floorplanner places any combination of gates, blocks, cells, and RTL. Time Builder has all of the capabilities of Time Planner and adds hierarchy and more powerful interactive capabilities that enable designers to traverse the design hierarchy and perform edits even inside a hard block. When blocks move, power and ground move with them and are updated on the fly. With timing budgeting and static-timing analysis, designs can migrate in parallel from RTL to gates and maintain chip-level context and timing abstractions. Prices for annual time-based licenses for Time Planner and Time Builder start at $98,000 and $175,000, respectively.

InTime Software, 1-408-565-0111, www.intimesw.com.