DFM software targets power leakages

Blaze MO optimisation software is billed as the industry's first electrical DFM solution.

Blaze DFM has introduced Blaze MO optimisation software, the industry's first electrical DFM solution.

Blaze MO equips chip designers with the power to get the most out of 90nm and below process technologies.

With Blaze MO, designers drive their power and performance requirements into the manufacturing flow, effectively "turbocharging" the manufacturing process.

Blaze-enhanced designs are faster, less leaky and have better parametric yield.

"Blaze MO has delivered eye-opening results", said Dave Reed, Blaze cofounder and VP of Marketing and Business Development.

"In side-by-side silicon comparisons on a triple-Vt low-leakage 90nm process, one customer was able to reduce average leakage power by more than 21% on a high-volume consumer product, while cutting leakage variability by 26%, without making any design modifications".

"The net result was a substantial double-digit increase in parametric yield".

Blaze MO uses a design's power and timing requirements to drive the manufacturing process.

This results in significant improvements in leakage power, leakage variability, and timing.

The economic impact of the improvement in parametric yield can be enormous.

Blaze MO tailors the manufacturing process for each individual design by providing design-specific guidance to the design-to-mask flow, so the chip designer is assured of realising the full potential from advanced processes.

Blaze MO has been proven on 90 and 65nm customer designs to reduce leakage power by up to 40% and leakage variability by up to 60% and to improve timing by as much as 10%.

Blaze MO does not require chip designers to change their existing design flow, golden signoff methodology, or handoff to manufacturing.

Blaze MO can be transparently plugged into any existing design flow and works hand-in-hand with resolution enhancement software used by the foundry.

Unlike DFM analysis tools from competing vendors, Blaze MO provides electrical design for manufacturing optimisation, not just problem reports.

Blaze MO uses manufacturing-aware analyses to drive optimisation of the design handoff to manufacturing, directly increasing the number of chips that meet power and timing specifications across the process window.

The value of Blaze MO has been proven in silicon and validated on production designs at a number of top-tier IDMs, fabless semiconductor companies, and foundries.

"STMicroelectronics is addressing many consumer and communications markets, where both dynamic and static power are key product differentiators, in order to increase battery life, or simply to fit into cheaper packages", said Philippe Magarshack, FTM Group Vice-President, Central CAD and Design Solutions General Manager.

"Early on, when engaging into 90nm, and now in 65nm, we recognised the importance of leakage-power minimisation".

"So, we were very pleased when Blaze MO was able to further optimise leakage out of an already extensively optimised processor core".

"We intend to apply Blaze MO to production tape-outs in the next two to three quarters".

Blaze MO is built on the Open Access database.

It integrates easily into existing design flows from Cadence, Synopsys, or Magma using industry standard file formats, including SDC, Liberty, Verilog, LEF/DEF, DSPF, SPEF, Spice and GDSII.

Blaze MO output can be used to drive any commercial OPC tool.

Blaze MO is supported by major foundries on many popular 90 and 65nm processes.

Contact the company for details.

Blaze MO is available today.

It is supported on Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL3, RHEL4), SUSE Linux (SLES 9) on 32/64 bit Intel or AMD-based platforms and Solaris 8+ on Sparc 64bit platforms.

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