CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

26 February 2009

Implementation Investments

ZiiLABS Tapes Out With Magma's Quartz Physical Verification Products

Magma® Design Automation Inc. announced that ZiiLABS, pioneers of StemCell™ Computing, used Magma's Quartz™ DRC and Quartz LVS Physical Verification system to tape out the recently announced ZMS-05 processor. The Quartz tools are part of ZiiLABS' ultra low-power, 65-nanometer (nm) system-on-a-chip (SoC) implementation environment based on Magma's Talus® platform. The scalability of the Quartz products and the integration with Talus enabled ZiiLABS to significantly reduce the time to tape out of the ZMS-05.

The ZMS-05 is a media-rich application processor that delivers high-performance application, graphics and multimedia capabilities within a low-power environment to enable its customers to develop a broad range of products to deliver enhanced mobile internet browsing, media playback and capture, navigation, video communication and gaming.

The multi-core design includes 24 fully programmable processing elements, dual ARM cores, and a broad range of I/Os and peripheral functions. The ZMS-05 achieves ultra low-power consumption through its unique architecture and implementation methodology. The design features dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, multiple clock domains, RAM standby and voltage islanding, allowing independent power down of 16 regions in the chip.

"As a market innovator in low-power SoCs, ZiiLABS invests in advanced electronic design automation (EDA) solutions that enable us to deliver highly complex products to market on time and on budget," said Paul Pontin, vice president of Technical Strategy at ZiiLABS. "Using a multi-CPU methodology during full-chip verification, Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS reduced runtime from 2.5 days to 9 hours - making it an overnight run. This provided a significant productivity gain during tapeout. Foundry runsets for both 90 nm and 65 nm were readily available to download and Magma's focused support provided a high degree of confidence in achieving success on this critical tapeout."

"With the inherently faster speed enabled by its scalable multi-CPU architecture, using Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS for final sign-off dramatically reduced final physical verification turnaround time of the ZMS-05," said Suk Lee, general manager of Magma's Custom Design Business Unit. "That speedup coupled with the integration of Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS into the Talus implementation environment also dramatically reduced overall implementation time and effort."

Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS are architected to process integrated circuit (IC) designs of any size, at any technology node, in the least amount of time. Magma's is the first truly scalable physical verification solution, able to provide turnaround time that is up to an order of magnitude faster than existing solutions by leveraging existing compute resources. The Quartz tools are fully compatible with third-party IC implementation flows and can read file formats used by traditional physical verification tools. Integrated with Magma's Talus platform for digital implementation, Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS offer additional time savings by eliminating the need to stream data between the implementation system and the physical verification tool.

The latest release of the Quartz DRC/LVS products also offers an enhanced power/ground short-detection capability that pinpoints the exact location of shorts rather than just the path, and detects multiple shorts in a single run. This makes shorts easier to correct and speeds full-chip debug.

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