Date: 17/03/2010

Magma's new multithreaded and faster VLSI static timing analysis tool Tekton

VLSI EDA tool vendor Magma Design Automation has unveiled a tool named Tekton, a new timing analysis platform. Magma says this tool offer higher capacity and faster runtimes than traditional tools, without sacrificing accuracy. Magma also says unlike other solutions, Tekton runs multi-scenario analysis efficiently on low-cost hardware without requiring a large number of expensive servers and software licenses.

"The complexity of timing sign-off has reached crisis proportions, forcing design teams to re-evaluate resource planning, design architectures and final sign-off solutions," said Premal Buch, general manager of Magma's Design Implementation Business Unit.

"Capacity and runtime limitations of current STA tools often force teams to sacrifice accuracy to meet tight design schedules, or they must invest in expensive servers and additional software licenses in an attempt to achieve reasonable turnaround times. By enabling STA in just minutes for the industry's biggest chips - on a single machine - Tekton is truly the next-generation timing analysis platform."


Tekton is designed to handle on-chip-variation (OCV), composite current source (CCS) models and crosstalk analysis more efficiently. Tekton maintains complete flow compatibility with existing STA tools.

Tekton can accommodate more than 100 million instances and more than 15 PVT corners. Magma says traditional STA solutions often take hours or days and numerous machines to deliver results on complicated designs that have many analysis scenarios. Tekton's multi-threaded architecture provides near-linear scaling on up to 24 CPUs. For a single timing scenario, with OCV and crosstalk enabled, Tekton performs timing analysis on designs greater than 10 million cells in minutes.


The Tekton platform includes full-chip extractor QCP with the accuracy of the industry standard, QuickCap. QCP does efficient multi-corner extraction including voltage and temperature (PVT) corners, which are added for each process node migration. Tekton and QCP are fully multi-threaded for near linear performance on up to 32 CPUs. Tekton and QCP can be used together in a single STA timing session for "what-if" analysis for engineering change orders (ECOs).


Magma suggests, coupling Tekton's timing analysis with QCP's extraction in a single session allows designers to simultaneously iterate through the timing closure process of analyzing, fixing and extracting nets. The ability to make changes and get accurate timing results can drastically reduce the amount of time spent in trial-and-error ECO loops.

Magma claims Tekton performs timing analysis, with OCV and crosstalk enabled, in less than one hour on a single CPU.

"To ensure we provide the highest quality of silicon, we analyze our chips across many operating modes and PVT corners," said Jay Avula, vice president of Technology at Server Engines. "The amount of STA we require puts our tapeout schedule at risk, and it will be only getting worse. Tekton runtimes are truly exceptional. We believe Tekton will meet our growing STA challenges without increasing our compute resources."


To address the timing closure challenges design teams face at 40 nm and below, Tekton supports advanced OCV (AOCV) margin reduction techniques to speed up chip tape out and reduce die sizes.


Availability: Tekton and QCP are in limited release. General availability will begin in June 2010.