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News Article

STARC adds Magma's quartz solution to 65- and 45-nm design project

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Magma Design Automation Inc announced that the Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Centre (STARC) of Japan has chosen Magma's Quartz SSTA statistical static timing analysis and optimization software for its process-friendly design flow methodology project for 65- and 45-nanometer (nm) and smaller geometries. Quartz SSTA is part of the variation-aware design methodology that's currently under development and slated for early 2007 release. After a detailed investigation, STARC has chosen Magma software for their evaluation project because of its comprehensive approach to statistical static timing analysis and optimization, demonstrated accuracy and fast turnaround time.

"When faced with process variation at 65 and 45 nm and below, many of our member companies are discovering that traditional timing analysis and sign-off are too pessimistic, making timing closure difficult to reach," said Nobuyuki Nishiguchi, STARC's vice president of Design Methodology. "We are testing Quartz SSTA's analysis and optimization capabilities and its ability to address timing and parametric yield problems caused by process variation. We expect that Quartz SSTA will reduce redundant pessimism, improve turnaround time and enhance the robustness of the design.

"Semiconductor processes at 65 and 45 nm and below exhibit more variations in manufacturing and sensitivity to operating environment parameters that affect circuit performance. Traditional sign-off flows are overly conservative and often inaccurate because they run static timing analysis (STA) at an increasing number of process and environmental corners with highly guard-banded on-chip variation (OCV) analysis. As a result, traditional STA approaches do not scale to 65 and 45 nm and are unable to account for process and metal variations, causing designers to sign off on designs that may ultimately fail in silicon. Designs that pass traditional corner-based sign-off standards may still fail in silicon due to process variations affecting both device characteristics and interconnect. This unreliable approach results in lower performance and longer, more costly design cycles.

Quartz SSTA gives designers critical information about how their design performance will vary with changes in process, metal or environmental variables. It supplements traditional sign-off methods with accurate SSTA that identifies cells and nets on both clock paths and data paths that are sensitive to variations. Quartz SSTA works with Magma's IC implementation system to automatically identify and fix timing problems that result from these variations. With this variability-aware IC implementation flow, pessimism is reduced, enabling faster chip performance and reduced area.

"Magma's statistical analysis and optimization flow is specifically built to address the challenges to analysis and sign-off caused by increased process variation at 65 and 45 nm and below," said Kam Kittrell, general manager of Magma's Design Implementation Business Unit. "As an organization focused on developing world-class design flows, STARC's adoption of Quartz SSTA underscores the need for statistical analysis and its ability to help designers achieve silicon success faster."

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