CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

20 October 2009

Implementation Investments

Intrinsity Uses Magma's Talus Platform to Implement World's Fastest Low-Power ARM Cortex A8 Processor Core

Magma Design Automation Inc. announced that Intrinsity, a provider of high-speed, low-power processors, implemented the world's fastest ARM(R) Cortex™ A8 Processor Core in a low-power process using Talus(R) Vortex and Talus Power Pro. Magma's open-architecture IC implementation system provided the needed support for Intrinsity's custom flows and proven ability to close timing while meeting the low-power requirements. As a result of this success, Intrinsity has upgraded to Talus 1.1, the latest version of the Magma system.

The core was implemented in Samsung's 45-nanometer (nm) low-power, low-leakage process technology and is being used in the development of standard mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC) products. Talus' placement-aware restructuring and physical optimization were key to achieving the 1-GHz operating speed on this design. Intrinsity leveraged the Magma system's open architecture and powerful interface to fine tune the optimization and the custom clock tree synthesis flow, ensuring that the best possible performance was achieved.

"Magma software has been instrumental in enabling us to deliver higher performance while keeping power consumption low on a number of designs," said Mark McDermott, vice president and general manger of Engineering at Intrinsity. "With the runtime improvements we've seen in Talus 1.1, we will be using it to implement other high-performance, low-power, time-sensitive design projects."

"The Talus platform was designed specifically for chips at 45-/40-nm or smaller and our customers have already implemented more than 50 such designs," said Premal Buch, general manager of Magma's Design Implementation Business Unit. "Intrinsity's ability to achieve 1-GHz frequency on a low-power process and tape out on time demonstrates why Talus is the ideal tool for high-performance, low-power, advanced-process designs."

Talus: Fastest Path to Silicon™ for High-Performance, Low-Power 45-/40-nm Chips

The Talus system was built to address the requirements of chip design at advanced process nodes. Talus 1.1 extends its capabilities. Magma customers have found that Talus 1.1 delivers significant improvements in runtime and timing convergence and that it achieves timing closure with no design-rule checking (DRC) violations while reducing total chip area. Talus 1.1 also offers a significant capacity advantage over competing systems, which allows design teams to work on much larger blocks during the design process.

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