Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Silicon Metrics | Subject: SiliconSmart SI
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 07 March 2003
Signal integrity modelling spots fatal
flaws
New from Silicon Metrics, SiliconSmart SI provides cell characterisation and modelling of signal integrity (SI), a critical requirement for complex SoC designs at 130nm and below.
New from Silicon Metrics, SiliconSmart SI provides cell characterisation and modelling of signal integrity (SI), a critical requirement for complex SoC designs at 130nm and below The tool, based on Silicon Metrics' industry-leading characterisation technology, is the first of its kind to fully support the noise models of the popular Liberty format
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 18 Oct 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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"SiliconSmart SI produces models that allow designers to isolate the errors that could seriously damage or render the design useless", said Vess Johnson, President and CEO of Silicon Metrics.
"The result is faster SI closure, significantly lower design costs, and final products that work".
SI analysis can flag many new problems that ordinarily require a designer's attention to correct.
Without accurate models, however, designers can be overwhelmed by the volume of possible errors reported.
The latest SI tools have features that alleviate this problem.
But the full potential of the latest class of noise analysis tools can only be realised with accurate models to identify and correct the real problems before committing to silicon.
"As we move to finer and finer process geometries our design teams will see a dramatic increase in the number of noise violations affecting functionality and delay", said Yoshio Okamura, Department Manager of Design Technology Development Department, Semiconductor and Integrated Circuits at Hitachi.
"To achieve shorter design cycles, our design teams must efficiently prevent, detect, and correct the true noise problems.
SiliconSmart SI provides the rapid throughput and the accurate models these design teams demand.
We will use SiliconSmart SI to produce our standard cell libraries at 90nm and below".
Using simplistic noise models that were pessimistic, first generation SI analysis tools falsely report large numbers of errors, known as false positives.
Second generation SI tools rely on more sophisticated noise models produced by SiliconSmart SI to help eliminate these false errors.
These sophisticated models represent glitch waveforms with glitch magnitude, duration, and shape, while simplistic models use only voltage magnitude.
Also, by using load-aware noise immunity models, second generation tools evaluate noise impact more precisely.
Finally, these newer tools use sophisticated models to analyse noise waveform propagation to determine whether an injected glitch attenuates as it fans out or whether it combines with other glitches to form more significant waveforms.
SiliconSmart SI provides the sophisticated noise models that make the analysis done by these second-generation tools possible, eliminating noise analysis pessimism and reducing the false positives that designers traditionally had to analyse by hand.
SiliconSmart SI helps library developers get to market quickly with SI modelling support despite resource constraints.
By integrating with the SiliconSmart CR database, SiliconSmart SI both automates characterisation setup and accelerates turnaround.
Existing timing and power data is used for intelligent measurement planning to optimise and accelerate SI characterisation.
Benefiting from Silicon Metrics extensive collaborative relationships with the major EDA tool providers in helping to define these new modelling standards, SiliconSmart SI produces models that are proven and ready to deploy with confidence.
SiliconSmart SI provides level 1, 2 and 3 models and enables use of new algorithms to reduce noise-related false positives.
Full-featured advanced modelling is ready when needed.
SiliconSmart SI helps to maximise the return on investment in SI closure flows without sacrificing the future needs of design teams.
SiliconSmart SI is configurable to support a range of SI modelling levels.
These levels match modelling construct support to particular analysis tool capabilities, allowing a trade off of characterisation complexity with analysis capability across multiple tools.
Modelling level support and capacity can be scaled as needs grow in the future.
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