CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
29 November 2005
Implementation Investments
Mellanox Tapes Out 4-Million-Gate, High-Performance Communications Design in Four Days with Magma's Blast Create and Blast Fusion
Magma® Design Automation Inc. announced that Mellanox, a provider of industry-standard, InfiniBand-based silicon and card-based solutions, has successfully taped out a 4-million-gate, high-performance, flip-chip device in just four days using Blast CreateT, Blast Fusion®, Blast RailT and Blast Noise®. With Magma's integrated RTL-to-GDSII flow and a small design team Mellanox was able to significantly reduce the area of the device and achieve noise and power sign-off without additional point tools, resulting in significant production and manufacturing cost savings.
"The Magma flow delivered a higher-capacity, more predictable and accelerated design cycle than our previous flow," said Evelyn Landman, principal engineer at Mellanox. "We were able to implement four key components of this next-generation device in a single, flat block, eliminating unnecessary hierarchy and minimizing the routing channel and ultimately the overall area. The ESP (Early Silicon Performance) timing reports generated by Blast Create allowed us to quickly identify and correct problems on critical paths and improve our timing constraints, helping us avoid time-consuming iterations and quickly develop high-quality RTL. With Magma we were able to tape out this chip faster and with a smaller design team."
"Mellanox provides cost-effective, high-performance interconnect solutions to leading server and storage vendors," said Premal Buch, general manager of Magma's Design Implementation Business Unit. "We're pleased that they have leveraged Magma's RTL-to-GDSII flow to further reduce the cost of their chip development while improving performance."
Integrated Flow Increases Productivity, Accelerates Turnaround Time
Based on a unified data model architecture and advanced technology, Magma's RTL-to-GDSII flow concurrently optimizes for timing, area, power, signal integrity and yield, eliminates data format translation or file transfers between front-end and back-end tools, and minimizes iterations. This powerful solution enables users to increase productivity and accelerate turnaround time.
Blast Create and Blast Fusion are key components of the Magma flow. Blast Create is a next-generation front-end solution that enables logic designers to synthesize, visualize, evaluate and improve the quality of their RTL code, design constraints, testability requirements, floorplan and placement. With Early Silicon Performance (ESP) reports generated by Blast Create, designers can predict how their RTL and constraint changes will affect timing. Blast Fusion is a fast physical design system for advanced methodologies and nanometer process technologies. It provides advanced analysis and optimization capabilities for designing high-performance, low-power designs. Blast Fusion enables rapid design closure, taking into account new nanometer design challenges such as on-chip variation (OCV). Blast Noise and Blast Rail work concurrently with Blast Fusion to maintain signal and power integrity. With proven-accurate results, Blast Noise and Blast Rail can be used for noise and power sign-off.
About Mellanox
Mellanox's field-proven offering of interconnect solutions for communications, storage and compute clustering are changing the shape of both business and technical computing. As the leader of industry-standard, InfiniBand-based silicon and card-based solutions, Mellanox is the driving force behind the most cost-effective, highest-performance interconnect solutions available. For more information, visit http://www.mellanox.com .
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