CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
6 February 2007
Product News
Sequence Prevents Silicon Failures With SMMART Macro Modeling For SoC Dynamic Voltage Drop Analysis
Sequence Design announced a range of new features for CoolTime and CoolPower, including breakthrough SMMART (Sequence Macro Modeling using Advanced Region Technique) technology for advanced modeling of memories and other macros for SoC dynamic voltage-drop analysis. SMMART provides highly accurate representations of macros for chip-level analysis, with no capacity limitations.
Macros pose a special challenge due to their internal physical and logical complexity and other difficulties associated with their size, and SMMART addresses these challenges with its temporal and spatial modeling. Other transistor-based solutions fail due to sheer data size, prohibitive runtimes, and memory footprint at the SoC level.
"The low-power design closure challenge requires smarter and better tools, particularly with the rapid advance toward 65nm," said Vic Kulkarni, Sequence president and CEO. "With memories being an increasing cause of dynamic voltage drop-related silicon failures, key customers and foundry partners deploying Cool Products worked with us in understanding and solving the memory modeling issues at 65 nm and beyond."
CoolTime extends its concurrent voltage-aware timing analysis capability with advanced and accurate voltage selection. Designs pushing performance limits can now reduce pessimism by precise selection of instance voltages. Performance improvements include a 40 percent reduction in memory footprint and runtime for dynamic voltage drop analysis, and a 10X improvement in disk usage for dynamic voltage drop optimization. In addition, hold time optimization algorithms now insert up to 20 percent fewer buffers to limit ECO changes, speed design closure, and reduce power.
According to Don Butler, vice president of engineering for Genesis Microchip: "We have seen successful silicon after using CoolTime to insure our power-grid integrity for dynamic voltage drop and connectivity. The new CoolTime release improved our throughput by 30 percent and also reduced the memory usage by 30 percent."
About Cool Products
Sequence's Cool Products family -- CoolTime, CoolPower, and CoolCheck -- cut design closure times by preventing time-consuming iterations between separate timing, SI, power analysis and optimization tools.
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