CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

2 November 2005

Product News

Sequence Dramatically Improves Low-Power Lineup With New Releases

Sequence Design announced significant enhancements of PowerTheaterT, a complete toolkit for SoC power analysis and optimization; CoolPowerT, providing physical power optimization for leakage power, and dynamic power; and CoolTimeT, for static and dynamic power grid analysis and optimization.

PowerTheater now features gate-level time-based power analysis, providing a view of power dissipation as a function of time within a waveform display. The analysis also provides average power estimation numbers 2-3X faster than the existing flow. PowerTheater is now supported on the Intel Xeon platform as well running the SUSE 9 and RHEL 3 operating systems. It also provides strong links to CoolTime and other dynamic voltage drop tools for generating state information based on highest activity or highest power. In recent months, PowerTheater has been deployed by leading customers in the wireless and mobile computing SoC applications.

CoolTime dynamic analysis run time has been improved by 2-4X without sacrificing accuracy. A 14-million gate design now takes about three hours (as compared to 10 hours earlier) to complete a dynamic analysis run on an Opteron machine. In addition, this design takes less than 16G of memory (half of what the earlier version required). CoolTime has an updated extraction engine, PRX, which improves the GDS extraction runtime by 3-5X. CoolTime now features voltage drop optimization (VDO) for individual blocks or full chip. CoolTime's VDO consists of decoupling capacitor insertion into empty and/or consolidated spaces, and hotspot spreading, in which peak power is redistributed by moving victim or aggressor instances a short distance. CoolTime also features "SpeedView," a new layout viewer with electro-migration and voltage drop "wizards" that display results as overlays on top of the original design so data can be analyzed as much as 10X faster. This capability helps in debugging power grid failures.

CoolPower now has the ability to transform a non-power gated design into a power gated one with a new technology, "Power Gating Transformation (PGT)," to automatically and effectively reduce leakage current. PGT replaces all non-power gated cells in the specified modules or lists with the equivalent power gated versions, inserts switch cells to connect the power gated cells to real ground, connects the switch cells' control inputs to the specified Sleep-Control signals, and inserts interface cells on the nets driven by power gated instances but received by non-power gated instances. Since the power gating switches must be carefully placed and sized to minimize voltage drop and leakage currents while simultaneously minimizing area overhead, CoolPower features several new commands to optimize switch connectivity, placement, and sizing.

"We recognize along with our customers that power is the most serious issue facing design teams today," said Jerry Frenkil Sequence CTO and vice president of advanced development. "Sequence is committed to continuously improving the performance, accuracy, and ease-of-use of these tools as exemplified by this new release."

The new 2005.3 releases of PowerTheater, CoolPower, and CoolTime are currently available at no additional cost to the existing customers. For more information, interested parties may contact sales@sequencedesign.com .

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