STARC endorses FishTail for automated merging of multi-mode design constraints

PORTLAND, USA: FishTail Design Automation, Inc., the golden timing constraints company, announced that Japan’s Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center (STARC) has completed a detailed study of FishTail’s solution for merging multi-mode design constraints. This study has demonstrated that FishTail’s products can reduce the number of place-and-route (P&R) scenarios and, as a result, significantly improve P&R runtime.

STARC engineers conducted an exhaustive evaluation of FishTail’s mode-merging solution to establish that constraints were correctly merged even when there are significant differences between the clocks, case analysis and timing exceptions specified for functional and test modes.

The testcases established the ability of FishTail’s solution to correctly merge constraints even when one design mode does not completely dominate another. The quality of the merged constraints, in terms of accuracy and complexity, was established through a verification flow supported by FishTail that compared merged-mode timing to individual-mode timing.

Finally, the STARC study compared the runtime and quality-of-results (QoR) of P&R tools with both multi-mode and merged-mode constraints.

“Our study showed that FishTail’s automated mode-merging solution shortens P&R runtime by about 60% without impacting QoR,” said Nobuyuki Nishiguchi, vice president and general manager at STARC. “Merged constraints are automatically generated in a few hours by FishTail’s products, compared to the several days of manual effort that is otherwise required.”

“Our partnership with STARC has, over the years, resulted in the deployment of our formal constraint generation, verification, and now mode-merging solutions by the semiconductor industry,” stated Ajay Daga, founder and CEO of FishTail.

“Multi-mode design constraints are a reality today, and unfortunately P&R runtimes of days or weeks is also a reality. Our goal is to cut P&R runtimes in half. As a company we continue to bring solutions to the marketplace whose value proposition is unambiguous.”