Atrenta's SpyGlass-CDC solution reduces design risk for Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe

SAN JOSE, USA & LANGEN, GERMANY: Atrenta has announced that Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe has adopted its SpyGlass-CDC product. Fujitsu will broadly deploy the tool to help reduce the design risks associated with its complex system-on-chip (SoC) designs.

Early Design Closure solutions from Atrenta allow design capture, verification, optimisation and exploration early in the design flow at the register transfer language (RTL) stage, when it's faster and easier to correct problems and explore alternatives. This approach facilitates propagation of design efficiencies to detailed, back-end implementation with minimised schedule risk.

Atrenta's SpyGlass-CDC product analyses SoC designs to ensure that complex clock synchronisation schemes, such as FIFOs and handshakes, are correct. Bugs in faulty clock domain synchronisations between IP blocks on a chip are hard to find with conventional design tools and represent a leading cause of chip re-spins and field reliability issues.

“Atrenta’s SpyGlass-CDC product is critical in helping us avoid design iterations and general risks associated with our complex designs,” said Raimund Soenning, manager hardware development - Graphics Competence Center at Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe.

“We have been very impressed by the comprehensive solution offered by SpyGlass-CDC, which allows us to quickly identify real problems in our clock networks at the earliest possible point in the design flow. Our designs contain a range of synchronisation styles, and SpyGlass-CDC allows us to apply a range of structural and formal analysis techniques to give us complete confidence that no CDC problems exist.”

“The use of third party semiconductor IP from multiple sources, with multiple clock domains is a fact of life these days for complex SoCs," said Dieter Rudolf, strategic account manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Atrenta. "Our SpyGlass-CDC product is very effective at finding clock synchronisation bugs that can easily become chip killers. We're delighted that Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe has chosen SpyGlass to assist with its leading edge designs.”