Magma's Talus included in TSMC Reference Flow 10.0

SAN JOSE, USA: Magma Design Automation Inc. announced that the Talus IC implementation system has been included in TSMC Reference Flow 10.0.

With Magma software and the latest TSMC Reference Flow, designers have access to the "Fastest Path to Silicon" for designs targeted at TSMC's 28nm processes.

"TSMC 28-nm processes offer the promise of billion-gate ICs, but also bring the challenge of dealing with more physical effects, tougher power requirements and difficult timing closure issues," said Premal Buch, general manager of Magma's Design Implementation Business Unit. "Magma's latest release, Talus 1.1 with our new COre(tm) technology, combined with TSMC's Reference Flow 10.0, provides faster design closure on large, tough designs."

COre is Magma's new Concurrent Optimizing routing engine. This new routing engine, which includes the ability to push critical wires to a thicker and wider metal layer, supports TSMC's 28-nm design rules and provides faster overall design closure with better performance and predictability.

"For years TSMC has been leveraging close collaboration with leading EDA vendors, such as Magma, to co-optimize EDA design technology and our advanced process technology," said S.T. Juang, senior director of Design Infrastructure Marketing at TSMC.

"With the inclusion of the Talus system for Reference Flow 10.0, TSMC and Magma offer mutual customers differentiated design and process technologies that improve power, performance and design for manufacturability of 28-nm ICs."

Enabling 28-nm design through Open Innovation Platform (OIP)
Through the OIP and Active Accuracy Assurance initiative, TSMC enables innovation by promoting quality and accuracy throughout the semiconductor ecosystem. Magma software has supported the OIP since the platform's inception.

Magma works closely with TSMC and mutual customers early in the process to ensure product enhancements satisfy customers' deployment requirements. By engaging with TSMC and customers early, Magma has ensured that Talus is able to implement designs targeted at TSMC's 28-nm processes.

Enhanced low-power design techniques
Low-power support in Reference Flow 10.0 has been expanded to include the bottom-up hierarchical Unified Power Format (UPF) flow. The UPF can be used to specify low-power design techniques at all levels of a hierarchical design flow.

For low-power flows with multiple voltage islands, support for disjoint power domains with dual power SRAMs is now available. To address leakage, Talus is able to optimize leakage at different corners from timing optimization. This provides more accurate timing and leakage optimization, minimizing iterations. Talus also supports the Common Power Format (CPF) as part of its low-power flow.

Ensuring manufacturability at 28nm
To address design for manufacturability (DFM) and variability issues at 28 nm, Magma integrates Talus qDRC physical verification capabilities into the Talus Vortex place-and-route flow. This solution provides highly accurate timing-driven metal fill that is design-rule clean and meets timing and performance requirements.

Other physical DFM capabilities include lithography hotspot fixing within Talus based on TSMC qualified lithography process check (LPC) hotspot detection engines. By fixing hotspots within the Talus unified design environment, area and timing penalties can be avoided and a design-rule-clean layout is generated.

For electrical DFM, TSMC provides an integrated eDFM (electrical DFM) analysis, which is a combination of DFM effects on chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), Thickness-to-Electrical (T2E), lithographic Shape-to-Electrical (S2E), and stress effects.

Talus provides complete support for TSMC's eDFM-based timing analysis and optimization.