Extreme DA at DAC

Intro
Over the lunch hour on Tuesday at DAC I met with Emre Tuncer, VP – Product Engineering & Applications and heard about extraction and timing analysis.

Notes

GoldX – parasitic extractor. Fast extractor, recently announced, all new technology, early customer adoption. One customer deploying it in 40nm, soon to be 28nm.
– Sold stand alone.
– Fast run times.
– Scalability, more cores better speed.
– Within 2% of a 3D field solvers on average. Mean is 1.5%, sigma is 1%.
– SPF timing differences are within 5ps.
– Cell-based extractor (not transistor level tool, stay tuned for device extraction)
– Extract each block, then stitch SPF files together at the top level
Focus –static timing analysis (Engine is statistical), reduce the turn around time, less pessimistic models (less fixing).
TSMC – Gold Time is endorsed for Reference Flow (Statistical Timer).
Prime Time, why switch ?
– Faster turn around time
– As good or better than SPICE accuracy
– Better reductions than Prime Time, reduce the amount of pessimism

Gold Time – out for awhile now, OCV is important and short turn around times
– Broadcomm
– Qualcomm
– Xilinx
– Not working as closely with Common Platform partners yet, mostly TSMC
– Quick run times using efficiency, MT