Exar selects Magma’s Tekton and QCP to accelerate sign-off of 40-nm SoCs

SAN JOSE, USA: Magma Design Automation announced Exar Corp. has adopted the Tekton static timing analysis and QCP extraction software to accelerate sign-off and engineering change order (ECO) flows for 40-nanometer systems on a chip (SoCs).

Exar selected the Magma solution after an extensive evaluation in which Tekton and QCP were shown to efficiently perform multi-mode multi-corner analysis and extraction, to deliver 5X faster runtime than traditional tools, and to provide sign-off quality results. Exar is now leveraging the Magma solution to shorten development cycles and accelerate shipment of next-generation devices to customers to meet dynamic market requirements

“Our migration to smaller process geometries (40 nm and below) requires an exceptional timing analysis platform that yields rapid and accurate results over an ever increasing number of timing scenarios,” said George Apostol, executive VP of Engineering and Operations, and CTO at Exar. “Enabling analysis of multiple timing modes simultaneously, Magma’s Tekton and QCP with a multi-threaded capability for full-chip extraction gives us world-class performance to greatly shorten our time to tape-out schedules.”

“Tekton and QCP were specifically architected for today’s multi-core processing hardware, enabling the tools to quickly and accurately analyze the increasing numbers of extraction corners and scenarios required for sign-off at 40 nm and below,” said Jacob Avidan, GM of Magma’s Digital Sign-off Business Unit. “Exar’s due diligence in testing and subsequent deployment of Magma’s sign-off solution highlights its ability break the sign-off and ECO flow bottleneck.”

Tekton multi-mode multi-corner analysis
Performing multi-mode multi-corner or multi-scenario analysis is time consuming, expensive and cumbersome. Design teams are often forced to purchase many expensive servers and accompanying software licenses to parallelize the multi-scenario analysis in order to shorten run times.

In some cases, design teams resort to using abstracted timing models to accelerate the analysis, but at the expense of accuracy. Tekton performs extremely fast, multi-scenario analysis on a single machine and provides the accuracy of existing sign-off solutions. Over a variety of designs with up to 50 scenarios and design sizes up to 30M instances, Tekton performed timing analysis, with OCV and crosstalk enabled, in less than one hour on a single machine.

QCP: Meeting extraction challenges of advanced-node design
QCP was architected to provide the fastest extraction with the highest accuracy. QCP provides near-linear scalability on multi-processor machines as well as highly efficient distributed processing to handle increasing design sizes and the exploding number of corner scenarios at 40 nm and below. It allows designers to process large numbers of corners in a single extraction run, with a minimal increase in runtime over single-corner extraction.

With a combination of sign-off-quality extraction and the fastest runtimes in the marketplace, QCP offers both maximum efficiency in timing closure and confidence in design integrity.