Product category: Design and Development Software
News Release from: Cadence Design Systems | Subject: Cadence low-power solution
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 23 January 2008
Reference flow incorporates power
reduction system
The Pride V1.5 flow incorporates the CPF-based Cadence low-power design solution to provide an automated and holistic low-power design flow from RTL design through GDS II tape-out.
Japan's Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Centre (STARC) has released its low-power Pride reference flow V1.5, incorporating the Common Power Format (CPF)-based Cadence low-power solution This reference flow also includes key litho-aware manufacturing (DFM) technologies from Cadence
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 30 Jan 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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This reference flow is expected to provide significant power savings, yield enhancement and time to market advantages for STARC members producing high-volume consumer, communications and mobile electronic devices on 65 and 45nm processes.
"The STARC Pride V1.5 flow incorporates numerous requirements from our member companies for an advanced ultra low-power solution and an optimised DFM methodology", said Nobuyuki Nishiguchi, Vice President and General Manager of STARC.
"The CPF-based Cadence low-power solution delivers a fully automated flow for the architectural exploration, design, verification and implementation of low-power SoCs".
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"The Pride V1.5 Flow also takes advantage of Cadence's DFM technologies to reduce overall design time and increase production yields for high-volume designs".
The Pride V1.5 flow incorporates the CPF-based Cadence low-power design solution supported by Cadence's Incisive and Encounter platforms to provide an automated and holistic low-power design flow from RTL design through GDS II tape-out.
Pride V1.5 enables front-end designers to explore physical prototyping with different CPF files and a single golden RTL, allowing low-power architecture optimisation.
In pilot designs, using the CPF-based Cadence Low-Power Solution STARC has confirmed 3X improvement in design time for architectural exploration to floorplan for low-power chips that employ advanced power management techniques such as multisupply voltages and power shut-off.
In addition to design productivity improvements, these techniques enabled up to 40% power reduction in the pilot designs.
Cadence's DFM technologies include model-based verification, litho physical analyser, litho electrical analyser, CMP predictor and chip optimiser technologies, which allow designers to analyse, optimise and correct potential yield limiters early in the design process, including physical and electrical effects produced during lithography.
Cadence's comprehensive model-based manufacturability solutions provide analysis of IP and full-chip designs for random and systematic manufacturing variations to prevent any catastrophic or parametric failures before tape-out.
This enables "what you design is what you get" (WYDIWYG) design for manufacturability to designers using advanced-node technologies.
"STARC and Cadence worked closely to implement and validate this DFM-aware low-power design flow and deliver an optimised design methodology to our customers", said Chi-Ping Hsu, Corporate Vice President of IC Digital and the Power Forward Initiative at Cadence.
"This CPF-based reference flow provides STARC members with the industry's only end-to-end, integrated low-power solution incorporating an advanced DFM methodology".
CPF is an Si2 standard format for specifying power-saving techniques early in the design process, enabling sharing and re-use of low-power intelligence throughout the design process.
The Cadence Low-Power Solution is the industry's first complete flow that integrates logic design, verification and implementation with the Si2-standard common power format.
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