Synopsys IC Compiler II delivers five-fold implementation speed up

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Synopsys Inc. announced that its IC Complier II place-and-route tool enabled Panasonic Corporation System LSI Business Division  (Panasonic SoC) to achieve silicon success with their high-end multimedia chip.

Unveiled at Synopsys User Group (SNUG) in Silicon Valley earlier this year, IC Compiler II is a game-changing successor to the IC Compiler product, the industry's current leading place-and-route solution for advanced designs at both established and emerging nodes.

Key capabilities in IC Compiler II include rapid design exploration, unique new clock-building, analytics-driven optimization to boost quality-of-results and extensive use of multi-mode and multi-corner optimization throughout the flow to accelerate turnaround time. The unique benefits it offered with five times faster implementation, IC Compiler II is now seeing expanded use to other designs at 40 nanometer (nm) and 28 nm process technology nodes.

"IC Compiler II was instrumental in enabling us to hit our market window and achieve silicon success for our complex multimedia chip. We are now entering volume production," said Hiroki Tomoshige, GM at Panasonic Corp. System LSI Business Division, Division 3, Second Development Group. "We are very pleased with the breakthrough performance IC Compiler II has delivered to shorten our design cycles and get our competitive products to market faster."

IC Compiler II was built from the ground up to deliver a major leap forward in physical design productivity. Based on a new multi-everything infrastructure and multicore technology that enables ultra-high-capacity design planning capability, unique clocking technology and advanced global and analytical closure techniques, IC Compiler II delivers a groundbreaking 10-times increase in design throughput.

IC Complier II's "analytically-global" optimization provides faster, broader and more convergent physical synthesis and closure. This natively multi-threaded technique utilizes new, highly scalable timing and extraction engines that enable extensive multi-corner and multi-mode (MCMM) optimization. Early and broad analysis enables optimization for large number of concurrent scenarios, improving signoff convergence and reducing ECO iterations to a minimum.

Additionally, patent-pending MCMM-aware local-skew clock construction techniques enable significant speed up in the building of complex clock networks with hundreds of domains and achieve the high-frequency clock requirements that are typical for the success of high-end chips.

"The unique benefits it offers with five times faster implementation illustrates why our customers are seeing IC Compiler II as a game-changing solution that is redefining the implementation landscape," said Antun Domic, executive VP and GM of the Design Group at Synopsys. "We are engaged broadly to bring the power of 10X delivered by IC Compiler II to more customers and help them get more competitive products to market faster."