Magma’s Talus Vortex FX offers unmatched capacity, throughput for multimillion-cell designs

SAN JOSE, USA: Magma Design Automation Inc. has unveiled Talus Vortex FX, the first and only integrated circuit (IC) implementation solution to fully utilize distributed computing for place and route.

Talus Vortex FX is up to three times faster than Magma’s new Talus 1.2, which was also announced today. Talus Vortex FX significantly increases productivity and provides higher capacity, enabling designers to implement multimillion-cell designs flat and to generate 2 million to 5 million cells per day with crosstalk avoidance, advanced on-chip variation (AOCV) and multi-mode multi-corner (MMMC) analysis enabled – while using existing hardware resources. Talus Vortex FX is the ideal solution for very large, complex advanced-node designs.

“Talus Vortex FX catapults Magma’s place-and-route technology far beyond anything else out there,” said Rajeev Madhavan, Magma CEO. “Our engineering investment in the Distributed Smart Sync technology has yielded great benefits for our customers. It puts Magma in the unique position of enabling designers to accelerate the development cycle of more complex and differentiated products without lengthening design cycles, increasing hardware costs or adding resources. This is critically important for customers adopting 28-nanometer (nm) processes and looking forward to 20 nm.”

Talus Vortex FX, the industry’s first distributed management solution for IC implementation, builds on the capabilities of Talus 1.2 to deliver even higher capacity and up to three times additional throughput. Talus Vortex FX’s Distributed Smart Sync technology represents a significant breakthrough. It enables concurrent implementation management and smart synchronization of very large designs across a network of machines. This allows designers to fully optimize much larger blocks, significantly shortening turnaround time.

Talus Vortex FX enables efficient use of existing hardware and software resources. Talus 1.2’s intelligent memory usage allows Talus Vortex FX to run across standard server platforms, typically configured with four to eight processor cores and 64 GB of memory. In addition, Talus Vortex FX is able to leverage existing Talus 1.2 licenses that may be idle.

Talus Vortex FX is already gaining industry support through limited release at select customers. Because it’s based on Talus 1.2, Talus Vortex FX is fast and easy to adopt. Magma customers have already been able to validate the throughput benefits on their design data in just a few days.