CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
17 May 2004
Product News
Magma's Blast Plan Pro Version 4.2 Provides Comprehensive Design Planning and Prototyping for Nanometer Designs
MagmaŽ Design Automation Inc. announced it has added a black-box methodology for pre-RTL design planning and floorplan generation, including highly automated partitioning, macro placement, time budgeting and pin optimization, to Blast PlanT Pro Version 4.2, a key component of Magma's hierarchical design flow. This version also features the industry's first IR-drop-driven power mesh optimization, enabling efficient power management. With these enhancements, Blast Plan Pro provides a complete design planning and prototyping solution for multimillion-gate nanometer designs.
"Designers today are faced with staggering chip complexity and tight delivery schedules," said Tim Baldwin, technical marketing manager for Magma. "Since its introduction two years ago, several ASIC vendors and customer-owned tooling (COT) flow users have used Blast Plan Pro for full-chip tapeouts of designs with up to 20 million gates. We're pleased to be able to offer our customers enhancements that will allow them to fully optimize their design and provide them the confidence that it will be successfully implemented."
A typical high-end design usually has a mix of existing third-party and internal IP blocks, pre-RTL black boxes that make up the top-level chip architecture and new blocks that bring added functionality. Blast Plan Pro 4.2 efficiently handles black box definitions for the pre-RTL blocks, as well as Magma's patented GlassBoxT models. The GlassBox-model approach to data reduction yields a block abstract that contains the physical and timing information, as well as enough of the logic at the periphery of the block to enable optimization across hierarchical boundaries. This approach provides a very efficient means for creating time budgets, optimizing the global timing and chip assembly at the top level without consuming large amounts of memory. With this technology, Blast Plan Pro 4.2 allows customers to handle designs with over 50 million gates.
A typical high-end design also includes rectilinear and abutted blocks. Blast Plan Pro 4.2 now supports both abutted and rectilinear blocks, providing comprehensive hierarchical design support and allowing for easy adoption into existing design flows.
With the advent of multimillion-gate nanometer process technology, designs often have over 200 macros. Manual macro placement is extremely time consuming and reduces quality of results (QoR). Blast Plan Pro's enhanced timing-driven placement and channel sizing technology provides improved QoR, enabling faster timing closure and a more predictable design flow.
Because it is based on the same unified data model as the Blast RailT power analysis tool and the Blast FusionŽ physical design system, Blast Plan Pro has access to complete power and physical design data and the same analysis engines. With this tight integration, Blast Plan Pro provides the first and only automatic power-mesh optimization that is integrated within prototyping environment. This unique capability allows designers to perform IR drop and power mesh analysis during prototyping, allowing them to identify and avoid power problems later in the flow.
Blast Plan Pro 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 Plan Pro 4.2 will be in production release in June 2004 with pricing starting at $315,000/year for a three-year license.
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