CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
1 June 2004
Product News
Sequence's CoolTime V-Drop & SI Analysis Solution Offers Industry Leading Accuracy and Performance for Nanometer SoC Design
Sequence Design announced the new release of CoolTime, a dynamic voltage-drop analysis tool that offers users high accuracy, high performance and low memory usage.
"CoolTime is the only analysis engine that we've seen in the market for concurrently analyzing timing, signal integrity and voltage-drop in a single engine," said Scott Sellers, vice president of hardware engineering, CTO and co-founder of Azul Systems ( http://www.azulsystems.com/ ). "Dynamic voltage-drop can be substantially higher than that of static voltage-drop, necessitating a solution like CoolTime that also accounts for package noise effects and current peaks. Overlooking these effects risks chip failure."
The speed of a CoolTime run has increased by four fold. The memory footprint is a third of what was generated from the previous generation of the product. These productivity improvements enable CoolTime to perform voltage drop analysis on a 5 million instances (20-25 million gate), design in an overnight run.
This new release of CoolTime permits users to run the tool in high accuracy or high performance mode. AccuwaveT, the high accuracy mode of CoolTime has achieved accuracy within 5-10% of SPICE on a full SoC, unequaled in customer benchmarks of competing analysis tools.
The Accuwave mode utilizes current waveform characterizations of standard cells. The characterization for instantaneous currents, in addition to voltage de-rated timing and glitch propagation is performed using the Electrical Modeler, ElMo, from Sequence.
The waveform characterization can be design-specific or for an entire standard cell library. Design-specific characterization reduces overall characterization runtime with the added benefit of incremental characterization for a new or modified design.
CoolTime also has a high performance mode for fast dynamic voltage drop analysis that uses the .lib power libraries for current waveform modeling. This method results in accuracy within 10-15% of SPICE using Sequence patented algorithms for current waveform modeling.
The performance and memory benefits are evident in the range of CoolTime functionality, from extraction of power grids to current analysis to voltage drop analysis.
The functionality described above is currently available.
This new release supports Linux 64-bit operating system on the Opteron and Itanium-2 platforms for Redhat Enterprise Linux.
CoolTime will be demonstrated from June 7-10, 2004 in booth 2107 at the Design Automation Conference in the San Diego Convention Center. To register, please visit: http://www.sequencedesign.com/3_news/query-form.html
For additional information on CoolTime, please visit: http://www.sequencedesign.com/2_solutions/2b_cooltime.html
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