Magma’s Tekton achieves adoption milestone

SAN JOSE, USA: Magma Design Automation Inc. announced that since its release 18 months ago, Tekton has grown its customer base to more than 25 companies, achieving the fastest adoption rate of any tool in the company’s history.

Tekton, the most advanced sign-off-quality static timing analysis (STA) tool on the market, was introduced to the industry in the spring of 2010. This unprecedented growth was accomplished despite the chip industry’s shrinking electronic design automation (EDA) budgets and designers’ historical unwillingness to change sign-off tools.

“Tekton has garnered strong customer interest for multiple reasons,” said Jacob Avidan, general manager of Magma’s Digital Sign-Off Business Unit. “First and foremost, the need for faster runtimes and true multi-mode, multi-corner (MMMC) sign-off is not being met by legacy tools today. Second, Tekton’s superior architecture, which was designed specifically for multi-core processing and concurrent MMMC analysis, has been proven on production designs. And third, customer confidence is high in Magma’s ability to sustain its performance and technology leadership in timing sign-off solutions.”

Customers are using Tekton to accelerate post place-and-route engineering change order (ECO) loops as well as for final sign-off runs. With the slow runtimes of legacy tools and the increasing number of scenarios that need to be analyzed, today’s timing closure phase can take two to three months to complete.

Tekton’s concurrent MMMC analysis and multi-threaded architecture can save tens – if not hundreds – of hours over the span of numerous ECO loops. Tekton also provides a huge savings in hardware costs for MMMC analysis. Recent customer results show savings between 75 and 95 percent of machine-count usage for running large numbers of scenarios. With fast and sign-off-accurate results in the ECO flow, customers can have confidence in using Tekton for final timing sign-off analysis and eliminate the need for additional STA point tools.

Tekton’s customers range from the largest networking and mobile broadband design houses to some of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers. More than half of the top 20 IDMs and fabless semiconductor companies are committed to using Tekton.

“The diversity of customers using Tekton has driven our R&D and support resources to produce a robust tool that works across a broad range of design styles and technology nodes including advanced nodes such as 28 and 20 nanometer. This diversity has also driven continued development to maintain Tekton’s competitive edge over other STA tools,” Avidan added. “In the last 9 months alone, Tekton’s runtime has been improved by over 2X while maintaining the same sign-off accuracy.”

Tekton was developed as part of a fully integrated system that includes extraction sign-off and place-and-route capabilities that use the same data base and are MMMC aware. This allows the platform engines to work simultaneously and to achieve higher quality of results and throughput compared to competitive point-tool solutions.