News Release from: Monterey Design Systems
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 5 December 2002

Software aims for multi-million-gate nanometer ICs

Monterey Design Systems has released new versions of its IC Wizard hierarchical design planner, Sonar physical synthesis and prototyping tool, and Dolphin physical implementation system.

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Monterey Design Systems has released new versions of its IC Wizard hierarchical design planner, Sonar physical synthesis and prototyping tool, and Dolphin physical implementation system. Release 2.5 of the Monterey toolset is the fastest, highest capacity, and most functionally complete product line ever offered by the company. Recently announced tapeouts and target designs include consumer electronics chips, streaming data processors, and switch fabrics ranging in size from one million to 20 million gates on process technologies of 150, 130 and 90nm.

"TeraChip uses Monterey exclusively for hierarchical design planning and physical implementation.

With our unique layout methodology and Monterey tools, we closed the physical design of a very complex high-end chip, covering all deep submicron signal integrity issues, with a minimum of engineering effort", said Gideon Paul, Vice President of R and D at TeraChip Corporation.

"Using Monterey tools, we were able to achieve the impossible the implementation of a unique switch fabric architecture combining high bandwidth and high functionality on one compact chip, in record time.

This switch fabric solution, driven by Monterey tools, enabled our customers to implement elegant simplified solutions at significantly lower cost".

Complex SoCs today contain hundreds of memory, analogue and mixed signal blocks.

Gate-level design planners are not geared to handle designs with many hard blocks.

Prior releases of IC Wizard were optimised to deal with hundreds of hard blocks, but worked best when standard cells were clustered into blocks at the top level.

IC Wizard 2.5 has been enhanced to support un-clustered standard cells at the top level.

Today, IC Wizard is the only hierarchical design planner available that can handle multi-million-gate chips containing hundreds of blocks and millions of standard cells simultaneously.

For very large blocks that contain more than a million gates and are instanced multiple times in a design, it is often advantageous to choose a single implementation of the block in order to reduce the time and effort needed to implement the block.

IC Wizard automatically configures the timing and physical constraints taking into consideration all instantiations of the block within the context of the chip-level design plan and resulting in a faster and more optimised implementation.

IC Wizard is the only hierarchical design planner that handles an unlimited number of levels of hierarchy.

Gate-level design planners restrict designs to two levels of hierarchy.

This works well for digital logic design, but is overly restrictive when dealing with complex SoC designs that may incorporate hundreds of memory, analogue and mixed signal elements.

IC Wizard enables the user to optimise the physical hierarchical structure by clustering elements to create new levels of hierarchy, by flattening structures to remove levels, or by moving entire branches from one part of the hierarchical tree to a different part.

It also tracks all changes so that comparisons can be made between different structures.

"IC Wizard is a complete design planner that expertly handles hierarchical designs", continued Paul of TeraChip.

"Using IC Wizard, we were able to close, in a very short time, our highly complex chip interconnect as well as detailed blocks and pin placement".

The run times of Sonar and Dolphin 2.5 have been improved by a factor of 2X with no penalty in quality of results.

On the recently announced Linux port, Sonar and Dolphin run five times faster than prior releases.

Benchmarks run on customer designs show that a million-gate chip can be taken from netlist to GDSII in less than 12h.

Sonar and Dolphin 2.5 offer improvements in circuit performance of 10-15% by incorporating new physical synthesis and placement algorithms.

This new functionality has been added without any degradation in runtime.

Memory usage has been improved to handle designs twice as large as prior versions increasing the flat capacity beyond 5 million gates.

When combined with the hierarchical capabilities in IC Wizard, capacity scales upwards of 100 million gates.

Support for flip-chip technology has been introduced in release 2.5.

The I/O bump pattern is imported into Dolphin and the router makes all connections from the I/O cells automatically.

Parasitic extraction in 2.5 has been improved such that Dolphin now correlates more closely to 3D field solvers than industry standard chip-level sign-off extractors.

The results from Dolphin extraction may be written out in SPEF and DSPF formats.

With release 2.5, ECOs may now be restricted to metal layers without changing the underlying polysilicon or diffusion layers.

During the initial construction of the chip, the user has the ability to include spare cells in the design that may be used for subsequent ECOs.

If the ECO does not require major structural changes, then it may be implemented by using the spare cells and making changes to routing on metal layers.

"Monterey Sonar and Dolphin were instrumental in our ability to deliver the T64 switch fabric chip set in record time", said Guntram Wolski, Director of VLSI at Tau Networks.

"We have seen significant improvements in the speed of the Dolphin 2.5 router and, based on our past success with Dolphin, we anticipate superior die size and time to market results on our next generation of switch fabric products".

"Customer feedback on our prior product releases was very consistent", said Dave Reed, Vice President of Marketing at Monterey.

"They were very satisfied with our technology, our approach, and the functionality and stability of our products.

We decided that we could best serve our customers by concentrating on speed, capacity, and quality of results.

With release 2.5, our customers can not only achieve the excellent results that they have come to expect from Monterey, but they can get those results faster and on bigger designs than ever before".

Release 2.5 of all Monterey products is available immediately on all supported hardware platforms.

Pricing for a one-year, time-based license starts at US $148,000 for IC Wizard, $105,000 for Sonar, and $400,000 for Dolphin.

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