Azuro strengthens leadership in timing optimization

SANTA CLARA, USA: Azuro Inc., the provider of advanced clock and timing optimization tools for digital chip design, has announced version 1.4 of Rubix, its industry-leading clock concurrent optimization tool.

This release deploys extensive refinements to the product’s underlying timing-driven placement, logic sizing, and useful skew-based clock tree synthesis algorithms, resulting in an average 15 percent increase in clock frequencies beyond traditional skew-balanced flows, 5 percent higher than the previous version of Rubix. The product also includes full support for version 1.1 of the Common Power Format (CPF).

“Rubix continues to build momentum within our existing customer base and also through several new customer engagements,” said Paul Cunningham CEO of Azuro. “At 40 and 28nm, building clocks to deliver the best timing rather than to be skew balanced is becoming a must-have to meet schedules and manage power consumption. With this new release of Rubix we are seeing yet further improvements in our already significant clock speed gains, even on high performance CPUs and GPUs. These improvements typically come with impressive 10 to 30% reductions in leakage power as well.”

Clock concurrent optimization is a new approach to clock tree synthesis which builds useful skew-based clocks concurrently with performing logic gate sizing and placement.

The key defining characteristic of clock concurrent optimization is that the timing picture being considered by all its underlying algorithms is a true “propagated clocks” view of timing based on real propagation of clock signals through the clock network.

CPF support in Rubix 1.4 follows on from the company’s announcement of its membership into the Cadence Connections program in March. Rubix 1.4 is available now and is already in production use at several of Azuro’s largest customers.