January 13, 2014
A number of effects have led to a dramatic increase in interconnect resistance in the sub-32nm process nodes that demands the use of smarter routing.
January 13, 2014
Increasingly complex design rules in 14nm and 16nm make it harder to connect local routing to the inputs and outputs (pins) of standard cells.
September 24, 2013
How the HPC company used Synopsys' Lynx Design System to standardise its flow and simplify migration to the next node.
October 23, 2012
The FPGA vendor's new flagship is now on public release. It adds an array of features, including support for system-level to HDL synthesis.
October 11, 2012
Manufacturability, routing, library design and more - it all needs rethinking at 20nm, writes Tong Gao of Synopsys.
September 12, 2012
A look at the way in which key tools, in IC implementation, modeling and extraction, and physical verification, are developing in response to the challenges of 20nm design
June 1, 2010
The demands of manufacturing closure at advanced process nodes make the traditional design-then-fix flow unmanageable. At 28nm and below, designers need a solution that can address manufacturing issues at any point in the design process, enabling a true correct-by-construction methodology. An effective solution must provide design-rule-check and design-for-manufacturing analysis using the actual foundry-approved signoff rules [...]
April 14, 2010
STMicroelectronics in Greater Noida, India recently completed an Omega2 set-top-box decoder IC targeted at HDTV markets. This article discusses how ST used Mentor Graphics’ Olympus-SoC software to address the closure challenges presented by a very large design. It describes how the design team used the tool suite’s chip assembly, concurrent multi-corner multi-mode (MCMM) analysis and [...]
May 1, 2009
The architectures that underpin today’s traditional place-and-route tools are showing their age, largely because their static timing analysis engines cannot handle more than two mode/corner scenarios. Thus limited, the software struggles to effectively implement low-power design techniques beyond such established concepts as clock gating and multiple threshold voltages. Designers run into difficulties when trying to […]
June 1, 2008
Signal integrity (SI) is an ever-growing problem as more interconnect effects and fast clocks increase the chances of crosstalk noise and glitches as well as unexpected signal delays. There has been a significant increase in SI-related timing violations due to the increasing influence of lateral wire capacitance in designs at 65 and 45nm. A fast-increasing […]