CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

17 May 2004

Product News

Magma Enhances Blast Fusion APX-Improves Quality of Results, Runtime and Design for Manufacturability for Large SoC Designs

MagmaŽ Design Automation Inc. announced enhancements to the Blast FusionŽ APX physical design system. Blast Fusion APX Version 4.2 includes leading-edge technology in all areas of physical design including placement, optimization, clock tree synthesis (CTS) and routing. New capabilities and algorithms allow designers to improve quality of results (QoR), runtime, and manufacturability and yield.

The placement and optimization technology built into Blast Fusion APX has been upgraded to enhance QoR. Timing-driven placement has been enhanced to improve wire length on critical paths. New cluster placement capabilities have been added to deliver faster timing closure on large, hierarchical designs. Improvements in high-fanout net buffering results in 50 percent fewer buffers and 50 percent better path delay. Automatic blockage creation and partial placement blockage helps to generate the floorplan for better timing and utilization while minimizing congestion and wire length.

Blast Fusion APX 4.2 also has a unique ability to accurately predict useful skew prior to performing CTS. This advanced capability eliminates the huge timing discrepancies between pre-CTS timing optimization and post-CTS timing optimization that occur in conventional approaches, resulting in significant improvement in timing and area.

Blast Fusion APX 4.2 features both distributed processing and multi-threading in routing. These comprehensive parallel processing capabilities result in an acceleration of routing runtime that scales with the number of CPUs. It provides great flexibility allowing users to leverage their existing hardware environment in either a network of single-CPU machines or in a multiple-CPU machine.

Design for manufacturability and yield (DFM/Y) capabilities have also been enhanced. Yield analysis from several silicon foundries has shown that for 130- and 90-nanometer (nm) technologies, the main causes of yield loss are vias (the connections between two metal layers) and metal wiring on the chip. Using an advanced routing algorithm, Blast Fusion APX 4.2 has delivered up to 32 percent fewer vias and 22 percent shorter wire lengths on several 130- and 90-nm designs, while maintaining good DRC performance. With advanced DFM/Y capabilities such as wire spreading, de-jogging and full support of DFM rules, Blast Fusion APX 4.2 can also generate lithographic-friendly structures-which further enhances the manufacturability of nanometer designs.

In addition, new routing and optimization capabilities deliver better crosstalk results while maintaining the legality of placement and routing.

Blast Fusion APX 4.2 can be previewed at the Design Automation Conference in San Diego, June 7-11. Register online for a demo at DAC at http://www.magma-da.com/dac   Blast Fusion APX 4.2 will be in production release June 2004 with pricing starting at $600,000/year for a three-year license.

 

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