Product category: Design and Development Software
News Release from: Monterey Design Systems | Subject: Dolphin 3.0
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 10 November 2003

Upgrade accelerates physical implementation system

The Dolphin physical implementation system incorporates patented Monterey Progressive Refinement technology to simultaneously optimise a design for timing, power, area and signal integrity

"We have been using Dolphin as our main design flow for the last two years and started testing the new 3.0 release as soon as we received it", said Nir Sever, Director of VLSI design at Zoran Microelectronics. "The results that we are seeing from Dolphin 3.0 have exceeded our expectations in terms of quality of results and execution speed.

The benefits are such that we have already switched to this new release to be our standard physical implementation tool".

Dolphin is the industry's most complete physical implementation system containing physical synthesis, clock tree synthesis, power network construction, physical implementation, extraction, and analysis in a single tool.

Dolphin, with its built-in analysis and physical verification engines, is able to produce final layouts that are 100% DRC-clean and have zero timing violations.

Dolphin 3.0 significantly enhances chip performance by automatically reducing the timing of critical paths by as much as 10%.

For example, designers can now expect improvements of 200-300ps in slack and 500ps in slope on a 300MHz design.

Run time performance has improved dramatically resulting in virtually instantaneous results on several key operations.

For example, full-chip IR drop can be calculated at the detailed placement level on a 1.8 million cell (9 million gate) design in less than two minutes.

The DRC engine has been accelerated so that a post-ECO DRC run can be completed in just minutes.

Dolphin now offers full support for 90nm design rules such as: length/width dependent spacing optimisation; obstruction specific spacing requirements; stacked via rules; redundant via insertion; and metal fill rules.

The analysis capabilities have been enhanced to offer more accurate results.

For example, the static timing analyser now considers the effects of IR drop on timing, and crosstalk is dynamically measured and updated during detailed routing.

Dolphin 3.0 features the industry's only configurable thermal map display.

Users may choose from a multitude of design parameters to be displayed on a thermal map.

For example, the user may display a map for the "skew" attribute of a net.

Dolphin will highlight all of the sequential elements on the net.

Cells shown in red indicate unacceptable skew.

Cells shown in cooler colours such as blue and green indicate acceptable levels of skew.

Other features include: dynamic update of crosstalk nets during detail route; automatic post-route buffering and sizing; optimised pin targeting; track assignment; and antenna rules that accommodate hierarchy.

Dolphin 3.0 is shipping today on 32bit Linux, and 32 and 64bit Solaris platforms.

Dolphin is priced starting at $400,000 per year.

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