Date: 07/04/2012

Cadence Encounter improves Ambarella’s SoC performance

Cadence Design Systems has announced that chip developer Ambarella has achieved improvements in power, performance and area on a recent 32-nanometer gigahertz SoC design by upgrading to the latest Cadence Encounter RTL-to-GDSII flow. Ambarella, by using the latest Encounter technology version 11.1, saw a 15 percent improvement in performance and a 6.4 percent reduction in power consumption over the prior Cadence technology when designing the encoder/transcoder System-on-Chip (SoC), as per Cadence.

“The complete Cadence Encounter RTL-to-GDSII flow allowed us to tape out a complex 32-nanometer SoC design and achieve significant and meaningful improvements in power, performance and area,” said Chan Lee, vice president of VLSI engineering at Ambarella. “The Clock Concurrent Optimization (CCOpt) technology alone saved us weeks of manual work by allowing us to optimize clocks and datapaths at the same time, while still delivering excellent results in power, performance, and area.”

Cadence explains: Ambarella was able to concurrently optimize the initial netlist for power, performance and area using RTL Compiler’s global synthesis approach, which enabled a predictable handoff to EDI System implementation. The new GigaOpt optimization engine inside EDI System produces results faster than traditional optimization engines by harnessing the power of multiple CPUs. The CCOpt technology also unifies clock tree synthesis with logic/physical optimization, resulting in major power, performance and area improvements. When joined with the integrated QRC Extraction and Encounter Timing System, the full benefits of CCOpt timing optimization are maximized by eliminating timing correlation ECOs, improving time to tapeout.

“Cadence is committed to technology leadership and deep collaborations with foundries and IP providers to enable customers like Ambarella to succeed in very competitive markets,” said Dr. Chi-Ping Hsu, senior vice president, Silicon Realization Group at Cadence. “The Encounter RTL-to-GDSII flow, with many of the latest advanced technologies, enables Ambarella to hit market windows with high-quality products.”