Cadence aquires Azuro

Cadence this morning announced that it has acquired Azuro. Azuro has become a leader in building the clock trees for high performance SoCs. A good rule of thumb is that the clock consumes 30% of the power in an SoC so optimizing it is really important. Terms were not disclosed.

The clock trees involve clock gating which can reduce clock tree power by 30% (and thus overall chip power by 10%). The can improve performance of the clock tree by reducing skew and thus overall clock frequency by up to 10%. And all while reducing the area of the clock tree by as much as 30%.

By reputation, Azuro’s technology is much better than the clock synthesis that comes for “free” in any of the major place and route systems. How easy it will continue to be to use, say, Synopsys for place and route while using Azuro’s ccopt (clock concurrent optimization technology) remains to be seen.