News Release from: Magma Design Automation
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 3 October 2005

Integrated flow cuts down image processor design

NuCore Technology, maker of the award-winning CleanCapture image processors, has standardised on Magma's RTL-to-GDSII design flow, including Blast Create and Blast Fusion.

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NuCore Technology, maker of the award-winning CleanCapture image processors, has standardised on Magma's RTL-to-GDSII design flow, including Blast Create and Blast Fusion. The decision to change flows came after Magma's integrated design system enabled NuCore to reduce area on this critical design by 16%, resulting in significant manufacturing and packaging cost savings; to take the design from final RTL to GDSII in significantly less time compared with the previous vendor's solution; and to reduce leakage power, a key requirement for battery-powered devices such as digital cameras and camera phones, by nearly 20%. NuCore Technology's previous flow, which was based on point tools from a leading synthesis provider, had failed to complete the routing on this design.

'Using Magma products gave us a tremendous business advantage by letting us complete this chip with fewer engineers in much less time - Magma made us more productive and saved us a lot of money', said NuCore President and CEO James Chapman.

'The point-tool flow we had been using required long turnaround times and large engineering teams'.

'In fact, we originally had four engineers working on this chip, and despite dedicating four months worth of expert manpower to it, we were not able to complete the routing'.

'But with Magma software we needed just two engineers to complete the design'.

'Plus, we gained visibility into the design that helped us quickly improve the quality of our RTL, solve the routing and congestion problems and reduce the leakage power'.

'As a result, we were able to fit the design into a smaller package, which results in considerable savings in manufacturing and packaging costs'.

'For large and small semiconductor companies alike, managing engineering resources and manufacturing costs is the biggest challenge in producing a chip today', said Magma CEO Rajeev Madhavan.

'We're very pleased that NuCore has validated the Magma software's ability to address design challenges while reducing overall chip development costs'.

NuCore relied completely on the integrated Magma flow for this fast, multi-million-gate design.

It was implemented by two engineers using Blast Create, Blast Noise, Blast Rail, Blast Power and Blast Fusion.

Magma's single executable architecture and unified data model provided the NuCore team with a consistent and seamlessly integrated system, allowing them to determine routability of the design in only seven days.

The final design incorporated scan-based design for test (DFT), and multimode constraints were used to achieve timing closure for all modes of this design.

The built-in timer common to all the Magma products was used for implementation and the accuracy of the timing results was verified to correlate with their signoff tool.

Signal integrity signoff was achieved with Blast Noise.

All NuCore Technology's design challenges were quickly addressed through concurrent optimisation, including clock gating, IR drop, multi-Vt, timing constraints, noise optimisation and timing closure.

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