CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
23 February 2009
Implementation Investments
Sondrel Adopts Magma's Titan Chip Finishing
Magma® Design Automation Inc. that Sondrel, Europe's leading physical implementation design consultancy, has adopted Titan™ Chip Finishing. Sondrel adopted the Magma software after an extensive evaluation in which Titan's highly automated flow and integration with the Talus® digital implementation and Quartz™ DRC physical verification products were shown to reduce turnaround time and deliver better quality of results within an easy-to-use, repeatable flow.
With conventional tools, chip integration tasks such as DRC and DFM cleanup, incorporating last-minute engineering change orders (ECOs) and adding manufacturing data, require manual, repetitive steps. Based on Magma's unified data model, Titan, Talus and Quartz DRC work efficiently together to reduce turnaround time. Titan's tight integration eliminates time-consuming, error-prone file transfers between tools and allows the system to retain custom layout edits when other changes have to be made, so designers don't have to re-do manual edits after each ECO. Its high capacity shortens GDSII load times of full layers and enables the GUI to provide real time interactivity even on massive data sets.
"To maintain its leadership position in IC implementation, Sondrel intelligently invests in advanced electronic design automation (EDA) solutions that enable us to deliver highly complex products to market on time and on budget," said Graham Curren, CEO of Sondrel. "With its proven ability to accelerate chip finishing and tight integration with Magma's implementation and physical verification products, Titan is an excellent addition to our flow."
"Incorporating custom elements into an IC greatly increases the design complexity, often causing delivery schedules to slip," said Suk Lee, general manager of Magma's Custom Design Business Unit. "With complete, automated chip finishing and migration capabilities and integration with the digital design flow, Titan provides designers with a significant productivity boost. Sondrel's evaluation results and adoption of Titan validate its ability to deliver high quality of results and reduce turnaround time for analog/mixed-signal ICs."
Titan: An Evolution in Analog/Mixed-Signal Design
Today, analog design flows and teams are isolated from the digital world. Analog integrated circuits are still largely full-custom and painstakingly crafted by hand. In addition to being time-consuming and prone to error, this transistor-level design style does not allow an existing design to be easily transferred to a new foundry or process/technology node. Instead, the migration of such a design effectively requires the circuit to be re-implemented from the ground up. With Titan, analog designers will still apply their expertise in defining the first circuit topology, but porting to new nodes will be significantly easier.
Similar to the leap in efficiency enabled by integration into the digital place-and-route flow, Titan is a giant step forward in automating and standardizing the routing of analog and special signals. Through an intuitive application of layout constraints, either interactively or fully automated through scripts, Titan performs bus routing, shielding, differential pair routing, star routing and other specialized routing in a matter of minutes. Existing manual approaches may take days. This becomes especially useful in the context of ECOs as rerouting can be automatically done with essentially no delay in the schedule.
About Sondrel
Established in 2002, Sondrel is Europe's leading IC consultancy. Its team of highly experienced engineers has completed over 120 designs, all of which were designed right the first time. Having completed 55 designs in process geometries ranging from 90 to 40 nanometers, Sondrel has proven expertise in the most advanced technologies. With offices in the UK, France, Italy, Israel, Sweden and China, Sondrel provides implementation services and methodology consulting to many top semiconductor companies, enabling them improve timescales and to reduce costs. Design capabilities range from design for test (DFT) to place and route (P&R). Utilizing proprietary low-power and optimization methodologies and software solutions, Sondrel engineers are behind many of the most cost-effective solutions on the market today.
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