CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
8 January 2007
Implementation Investments
Enigma Tapes Out HybriCore Backplane Interconnect Devices in Record Time Using Magma's RTL-to-GDSII Design Flow
Magma® Design Automation Inc. announced that Enigma Semiconductor, an emerging semiconductor company targeting high-performance applications in the enterprise, carrier and storage market segments, has successfully taped out multiple components from its HybriCoreT family of backplane interconnect devices using Magma's Blast CreateT, Blast PlanT Pro, Blast Fusion®, Blast Noise® and Blast RailT implementation products, and QuartzT Time and Quartz RC Sign-off in the LoopT products. The HybriCore family includes the industry's densest crossbar switch and fabric manager devices; both devices currently are in beta testing at customer sites. With Magma's integrated flow, Enigma was able to implement the EN6110 switch, which delivers 1/3-terabit-per-second full-duplex, non-blocking switching capacity, in just six weeks using the equivalent of four man-months of engineering resources.
"Both the EN6110 Switch device and EN6240 Fabric Manager feature a number of complex IP blocks with demanding timing and power constraints," said Robert Sturgill, CEO and president of Enigma. "With the advanced capabilities of the Magma software and a truly dedicated support staff, we were able to ensure that our HybriCore devices would operate inside our customers' stringent system performance and power requirements and deliver this ultra high-speed networking chipset in record time. Magma, with its built-in, non-iterative Sign-off in the Loop approach, played a critical role in the devices' on-time market introduction."
"With each of these devices including 12M transistors, Enigma's ability to complete this high-speed, complex design in such a short time and with a small engineering team illustrates the significant productivity advantages of an integrated approach to IC design and sign-off," said Kam Kittrell, general manager of Magma's Design Implementation Business Unit. "We're very pleased to have contributed to their success with our industry-leading design implementation flow."
Integrated Flow Addresses Complex Hierarchical Design
Enigma leveraged several Magma capabilities to efficiently integrate several challenging IP modules consisting of logic and high-speed memory, the EN6110 Switch device incorporates 36 12.5-gigabit-per-second links. The EN6240 Fabric Manager integrates four SPI 4.2 interfaces, a PCI management port and 14 12.5 gigabit-per-second-capable serial links and in excess of 10 Mbits of high-speed on-chip memory. Blast Plan Pro's automated hierarchical design capabilities eliminated the manual work required with any other flow.
The Magma system's open architecture allowed top-level assembly to be handled through simple Tcl scripts, enabling the back-end designers to quickly incorporate changes to the blocks. With Blast Create, the front-end designers were able to accurately predict the final timing of the link block prior to handing it off to the back-end designers. This allowed the back-end designers to focus on top-level timing only and eliminated front-to-back-end iterations. Blast Create also provided automated design-for-test (DFT) capabilities that further streamlined the flow.
Blast Noise, working concurrently with Blast Fusion throughout the implementation flow, automatically analyzed and adjusted the chip design to avoid crosstalk noise, crosstalk delay and signal electromigration problems. By automatically addressing these problems during physical design, Blast Noise eliminated the need for cumbersome post-layout analysis and repair, and also ensured working silicon. By enabling accurate analysis and management of power integrity throughout the implementation flow, Blast Rail NX ensured rapid convergence.
Magma's built-in sign-off engines, including Quartz Time and Quartz RC, were used for extraction, timing and noise sign-off, and also helped ensure working silicon. These integrated capabilities provided a correct-by-construction design flow, eliminating the need for time-consuming back-annotation and ECO scripts that are required with external sign-off tools.
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