Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Zenasis Technologies | Subject: ZenCell Factory
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 19 May 2004
Software automates library cell creation
ZenCell Factory is a novel automated library cell creation solution for standard cell-based design.
ZenCell Factory is a novel automated library cell creation solution for standard cell-based design ZenCell Factory is the first commercial solution to automatically create standard cells that are fully laid out, characterised and verified in a matter of days instead of months
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 14 Apr 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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"For high-performance standard cell-based designs, engineers who use existing cell libraries will experience difficulty in achieving timing closure", said Rob Roy, VP of Marketing and Business Development for Zenasis.
"We believe that ZenCell factory delivers a new level of performance results while substantially shortening the design cycle, by adding design-specific library elements for them to work with".
In today's nanometre designs using standard cell-based libraries, there is an ever-increasing demand for performance improvement without increasing cost and time-to-market.
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The limitations of standard cell libraries are becoming apparent in terms of choices that result in power and/or area penalty.
Furthermore, it is difficult to control library size without knowledge of the target design.
Custom design, while offering more flexibility, is not an option for most design teams as it is too resource and time intensive.
Designers have already begun implementing handcrafted design-specific cells, which are derived from one or more existing standard cell library elements and optimised at the transistor level.
ZenCell Factory can be used in conjunction with ZenTime, Zenasis' design optimisation product, which automatically identifies groups of standard cells in a critical path, and replaces them with custom-crafted design-specific cells.
The combination of the two products enables a new design paradigm by bringing custom level performance to a standard cell-based design flow.
Design engineers can now automatically create the necessary library views for the "ZenCells" - design-specific cells created by ZenTime - without requiring in-depth knowledge of the tools used by existing library creation flows.
The combination of ZenTime and ZenCell Factory has been successfully used to improve benchmark designs' performance by 15% or more.
ZenCell Factory reads a Spice netlist for each new cell, generates LVS and DRC clean layouts based on process and cell architecture information, extracts the layout parasitics, characterises for timing, power and produces the cells' views required by synthesis, timing, verification, and place and route tools.
ZenCell Factory provides a complete, integrated library creation solution, whereby new cells can be created fully automatically while conforming to the same cell architecture used by an existing standard cell library; therefore, the user's design optimisation and implementation tools view and use the new cells in a manner analogous to the original standard cells.
ZenCell Factory interfaces seamlessly with customer's in-house library tools via industry standard formats, and has a high degree of configurability with comprehensive reporting capabilities.
ZenCell Factory's enrichment of the existing library provides designers with greater ability to meet design objectives.
ZenCell Factory enhances library development team productivity by eliminating error prone manual cell creation.
For designers, ZenCell Factory enables exploratory cell generation and creation of beneficial new design-specific cells with a fast turn-around time.
Top library vendors and foundries have validated ZenCell Factory's quality of results.
The ZenCell Factory production version is available immediately for customer deployment.
ZenCell Factory is priced for term based licensing at $95,000 per year.
ZenCell Factory can run on Linux and Sun-Solaris platforms.
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