EDA startup touts timing analysis breakthrough

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- Electronic News, 5/21/2007

To allow multicore and multiprocessor compute platforms to execute 10 to 20 times faster than conventional tools, Littleton, Mass.-based EDA tool startup CLK Design Automation is detailing its Amber Analyzer tool, which the company says is the industry’s first true threaded and incremental static timing and signal integrity analysis solution.

Amber Analyzer was built on a new software architecture meant to increase incremental analysis throughput by 100 times or more over existing design flows without any compromise in accuracy, president and CEO Isadore Katz told Electronic News.

While so much attention in the EDA industry as of late has been paid to design for manufacturing, timing and performance analysis is one of the biggest bottlenecks in the physical implementation flow for high performance, nanometer designs, the company reminds.

For example, one signal integrity run can take 24 hours or more on a 10 million-instance design, and with most design teams running at least 20 metal/process/mode corners, analysis can run for a week.

Further compounding the problem are late-stage engineering change orders. A simple ECO, such as changing one net to repair a crosstalk problem, forces another 24-hour analysis run.

Katz says Amber Analyzer removes these barriers to allow design closure to be achieved with the use of threading compute methods, support for true incremental analysis, and functionality for a wide range of analysis tasks.

“The key is the architecture. Starting from the ground up with a threaded, incremental architecture is the only way to deliver static analysis solutions that will scale with compute platforms and customer designs,” Katz reiterated in a statement. “It reduces a considerable bottleneck in the IC design process and gives designers both the performance and features they need to deal with today’s largest, most complex designs.”

CLK noted that it developed Amber Analyzer in conjunction with major semiconductor companies, and says the tool has already been verified against multiple production, nanometer designs. It is shipping today for 32-bit and 64-bit Linux computing platforms with pricing starting at $25,000 for a one-year license.

CLK will be showing Amber Analyzer at the Design Automation Conference being held June 4 to 8 in San Diego, Calif.