Apache Design Solutions

Title	Description
PathFinder™: A Dynamic and Static Analysis Solution for IP and Full-chip ESD Integrity	This paper describes how PathFinder helps designers meet ESD guidelines and identify "weak" areas of the design (layout or circuit) most vulnerable to ESD failures. It also demonstrates how PathFinder can be used for early prototyping and design exploration, especially when clamp cells are inserted inside the core region of the chip.
Power and Signal Line Electromigration Design and Reliability Validation Challenges	This paper describes EM integrity analysis for power and signal lines. It outlines the various process and design trends that are increasing the likelihood of EM induced failures in a design and looks at conventional verification techniques for EM integrity and contrasts those with what is required for advanced process nodes.
Power Noise Integrity for Analog/Mixed-Signal Designs	This paper describes the need for power noise integrity solution for analog / mixed-signal designs and the benefits of the Totem platform, its usage model in a design flow, and results from simulation and correlation measurements.
RTL Design for Power Methodology	This white paper presents a Design for Power (DFP) methodology, beginning early in the design process at the Register Transfer Level (RTL) for maximum impact on power.
Apache Design Automation Chip Power Model (CPM™)	The traditional approach to chip-package-system (CPS) co-analysis and co-optimization lacks the required accuracy and thus limits productivity. To meet the increasing demands for system cost reduction calls for a new methodology that is more comprehensive. This white paper outlines the Chip Power Model (CPM™) technologies and solutions available from Apache Design Solutions to help address the CPS convergence challenge.

Atrenta

Title	Description
Do Your Chip a Favor: Manage the Constraints	A design goes through several transformations in a typical register transfer level (RTL) to layout flow, and a variety of verification techniques are employed (simulation, equivalence checking, etc.) to ensure that its intent has not changed. Figure 1 illustrates the overall flow. It’s normal for timing constraints to be created and refined in parallel with the RTL and netlist throughout the design cycle, but these constraints typically don’t undergo the same level of verification (or indeed any verification) before being used. The creation and refinement of constraints is largely a manual, error-prone and time-consuming process, and managing thousands of lines of timing constraints throughout the flow is nearly impossible. Subsequently, constraint problems pose a serious risk to the success of the implementation process.
Verification of multi-clock designs	Yesterday's SoCs are today's blocks and sub-chips. The resultant combination of interfaces, protocols and performance objectives regularly results in many clock domains on a single chip. Often, this is further complicated by multiple modes of operation and the associated range of clocking scenarios. This leads to ever increasing numbers of clock interfaces, where data is transferred between clocks of different frequencies and often between asynchronous domains. In this environment, designers, chip integrators and back end engineers must ensure the integrity of the clock architecture, and the integrity of its associated timing constraints.
SpyGlassŽ-CDC: Combining Structural and Functional Verification Techniques to Improve Effective Clock Domain Crossing Verification	Multiple, independent clocks are quintessential in SoCs and other complex ASICs today. In some cases, such as in large communications processors, clock domains may number in the hundreds. Clock domain crossings pose a growing challenge to chip designers, and constitute a major source of design errors--errors that can easily slip past conventional verification tools and make their way into silicon.
GuideWareT	Advances in silicon technology have enabled unprecedented levels of integration in today's SoC designs. These designs are developed through integration of various sub-systems. After the architecture and top level micro-architecture are reasonably complete, the task of developing and integrating sub-systems begins. These sub-systems may be developed ground-up with brand new sub-system RTL. Additionally, many of the sub-systems can be sourced as IPs from third parties or from an internal library of legacy designs. Integration of these sub-systems begins at appropriate times in the work-flow.
Constraints Management: Approaches and techniques for preserving the intent of timing constraints throughout the design flow	As the complexity of designs has scaled, the need to provide accurate physical constraints like timing, area, power and port locations has become increasingly important. Of these, timing constraints are the most difficult to provide since they depend on many external factors like floor planning, routing and integration with other blocks. Properly created timing constraints not only reduce the total effort to achieve timing closure, but also reduce the number of iterations to achieve that goal. These constraints undergo several refinements as they are pushed through the design flow from RTL to post layout. This requires that constraints be managed at each step and properly handed off to the next step to ensure that design intent is preserved. If constraints are not managed properly, unnecessary iterations between front-end and back-end groups occur, and the time to market and end unit cost is impacted.
SoC Physical Closure Begins at RTL	By Ramesh Dewangan, Ravi Varadarajan, Jitendra Kumar Gupta, Navneet Mohindru, Satish Soman, Atrenta Any survey of chip design teams consistently points to two problem areas impacting quality and schedule of today’s SoCs. Those areas are: a) completeness of verification, and b) physical design closure for area, timing and power for complex IP’s and SoC’s. With the advent of deep sub-micron technology, these problem areas have become exacerbated. In this White Paper, we take a closer look at the physical design closure aspects of advanced SoCs. We provide a root cause analysis of unpredictable physical design closure issues and explore possible solutions and methodologies to address these problems.
Facilitating At-Speed Test At The Register Transfer Level	This white paper demonstrates a solution for facilitating at-speed test at the register-transfer level. The RTL approach is important, because designers and test engineers usually verify the test coverage only at the gate level during the final ATPG stage. This RTL solution thus saves weeks of effort by fixing potential issues up front. The SpyGlass DFT DSM solution is the industry’s first tool which will accelerate design turnaround times by identifying timing closure issues caused by at-speed testing – early at RTL. It provides accurate RTL fault coverage estimation for transition delay testing, together with diagnostics for low fault coverage, early in the design flow, to achieve high test quality with minimum design iterations.
Congestion Mitigation During RTL Development	Early physical design closure is critical for successful SoC delivery. Routing congestion is one of the key aspects of physical design closure. In this paper we have focused on the logical congestion aspects. We have established the need for a solution geared towards RTL authoring and creation teams.

Denali Software

Title	Description
Mr. NAND's Wild Ride: Warning — Surprises Ahead!	NAND Flash manufacturing cost reductions of 60% per year sustained over nearly a decade have driven many technology changes, developments, compromises, and innovations. Prices have fallen even faster over the past five years, but the precipitous price decline could easily slow due to technical forces and in all likelihood, they will. Further, NAND Flash specifications are changing and will continue to change in predictable and unpredictable ways due to these forces. These changes are taking place throughout the industry, not with just one manufacturer's NAND Flash devices. These changes will create new capabilities for NAND users, will impose extra performance burdens, and may ultimately limit the flexibility of NAND Flash in future device generations compared to what is available today.
Anticipate AMBA 4 SoC Design and Verification Challenges	ARM's series of AMBA specifications have become the de facto standard for SoC (system-on-chip) interconnects since ARM introduced the first version of the specification more than 15 years ago. ARM introduced the latest version of the specification, AMBA 4, in March 2010. AMBA 4 is actually a collection of specifications (including AXI4, AXI4-Lite, and AXI4-Streaming), which may well revolutionize the future of high-performance SoC interconnects. Based on the industry's needs, AMBA 4 resulted from a collaborative effort by more than 35 of the industry’s leading OEM, semiconductor, EDA, and IP vendors. The AMBA 4 protocol is available now. It directly addresses the needs of high-performance, low-latency, and low-power designs.

EVE

Title

Description

ZeBu™: A Unified Verification Approach for Hardware Designers and Embedded Software Developers

Increasingly, embedded software is overtaking the hardware content of SoC devices. The net result is a kind of chicken-egg problem: which comes first - the “final” hardware or the “final” software? Embedded software developers need an accurate model of the hardware in order to validate their code, while the hardware designers need fairly complete software to fully validate their ASIC or SoC. Software developers can sometimes get started using a bare-bones, non-cycle accurate high-level C model of the processor or an instruction set simulator (ISS). Similarly, chip designers can simulate their design along with small code snippets or diagnostics to verify basic functionality. But eventually both these groups need to come together on a common model to verify the complete hardware and the embedded software together. Unfortunately, for most teams that first complete model is the actual silicon. What’s needed is a new approach to hardware-assisted verification that combines the strengths of traditional emulation with those of rapid prototyping into a unified solution that is accessible to both hardware designers and software developers.

Jasper

Title	Description
Post-Silicon Validation Using Formal Analysis	Verifying the current generation of complex SoCs requires the best methodology and tools, including the application of high-capacity formal verification technologies throughout the design flow, from architectural exploration to post-silicon debug. We see this last area, post-silicon debug, as an important value delivered by formal technology for design and verification teams who have not employed formal earlier in the process to get the design right the first time. As the case studies presented in this white paper demonstrate, the use of formal to find, fix, and verify the fix adds tremendous value in the post-silicon lab.
Using Formal Verification Across a Spectrum of Design Applications	Chip designers worldwide have told us that Jasper is fundamentally different in how we approach their technical and business problems by delivering a high ROI (return on investment) through the application of advanced formal verification techniques. Our tools address a spectrum of key verification challenges - from getting the architecture unambiguously right, to putting more power in the hands of designers, to promoting design reuse, to verifying critical functionality, to reducing process bottleneck, and even silicon debug.

Magma Design Automation

Title

Description

Tekton – Next-Generation Static Timing Analysis Platform

Chip complexity continues to grow and design schedules are more aggressive, yet design teams are staying the same size or even being scaled back. One key phase in the design process that has always been in the crosshairs is timing closure. How quickly the timing closure process can be completed may determine if the chip meets a critical market window or not. One of the significant timing closure challenges that designers using leading-edge processes are facing is the exponential growth in the number of timing scenarios that must be analyzed in order to achieve working, high yielding silicon. In this white paper, we’ll discuss how Tekton addresses the dramatic increase in the number of static timing analysis (STA) scenarios, the lengthy engineering change order (ECO) process and the need for increased accuracy for analysis of the final violations.

Mentor Graphics

Title	Description
Design Automation and Simulation of Switched-Mode Power Supplies	This paper illustrates the development of a flyback switch-mode power supply (SMPS) converter using the SystemVision simulation tool. Two design and testing automation techniques are presented: driving SystemVision simulations directly from a Microsoft Excel® worksheet and using schematic-based design formulas.

Real Intent

Title

Description

X-Propagation Woes: Masking Bugs at RTL and Unnecessary Debug at the Netlist

This paper presents a complete and practical methodology to comprehensively solve the X problem in RTL design. It begins by reviewing common sources of Xs, and describes how they cause functional bugs as well as unwarranted debug that prolong verification cycles. Solving the X problem helps minimize simulation and synthesis iterations and enables various design analyses (e.g. power analysis), normally performed on netlists, to begin sooner. The pros and cons of various point solutions to this problem are described. The technologies discussed include structural analysis, formal analysis, coding for X-accuracy, and simulation techniques such as random seeding of state initial values. It is essential that a complete solution address both X-optimism and X-pessimism woes as well as be applicable to all sources of Xs, facilitate debug, provide coverage analysis, and enable automation, high performance, and usability. The requirements of a complete and practical solution. based on feedback from users who deal with X issues are provided. The summary of our interaction with users is that the X problem is multi-dimensional and needs a holistic solution that brings to bear the combination of strucural analysis, simulation and formal analysis to solve effectively. We describe our user experiences and a case study based on our proposed solution.

Springsoft

Title

Description

Challenges and Requirements for Power-Aware Debug

Traditionally, area and timing have been the major issues faced by Integrated Circuit (IC) designers. Now, power has also emerged as a major concern for three reasons. First, low power is favored by numerous end-applications, such as cellular phones, hand-held gaming devices, and portable media players. Second, there is an increase in power density due to higher clock speeds and shrinking process geometries control. Last but not least, most system-on-chip (SoC) designs are composed of different blocks running multiple applications with varying power requirements.

Synopsys

Title	Description
Boosting Designer Productivity by Using Look-ahead Constraint Analysis Technology	Timing constraints are a crucial specification in the modern integrated circuit (IC) design flow. Implementation and signoff tools rely on them at almost every step of the design process. The rapid increase in design size and complexity, as well as the widespread reuse of intellectual property (IP) design blocks, has led to a major increase in both the extent and the complexity of timing constraints specification. Ensuring high-quality timing constraints is paramount to efficient design implementation, especially during handoffs between teams. Incomplete, inconsistent, or conflicting constraints can cause optimization and implementation tools to run ineffectively or to never converge. In this paper, we present a unique constraint analysis technology that checks for timing constraints problems and provides an interactive environment with context-sensitive diagnostic and fixing suggestions. Using this technology, design teams can save several weeks of engineering effort in a typical IC design project.
StarRC Custom Rapid3D Extraction	Accurate parasitic extraction is critical to the success of today’s system-on-chip (SoC) designs because of the growing use of sensitive custom circuits and the vulnerability of layout to increased process variation and parasitic effects. The nanometer SoC designers need a highly accurate three-dimensional (3D) field solver to extract larger proportions of the designs to ensure silicon success. A high-performance and high capacity field solver that is integrated with their existing post-layout extraction and simulation flow will enable designers to achieve their accuracy criteria with confidence as well as successfully meet their tight tape-out schedules. The next-generation Rapid3D technology in StarRC Custom provides an integrated 3D extraction solution to address these growing accuracy, performance, capacity and ease-of-use needs. This paper presents the new Rapid3D technology and the benefits it provides for a range of target applications, including IP characterization as well as custom analog/mixed-signal (AMS), high-speed digital and memory array designs.
Benefits of Using ESP in Memory Designs	ESP is an equivalence checking tool commonly used for full functional verification of custom designs such as memories, custom macros, standard cell, and IO cell libraries. It is used to ensure that two design representations are functionally equivalent. Many people are familiar with the logic cone based equivalence checking which is very effective for synthesizable designs with gate-level implementations, but it cannot be easily adapted to full custom circuits like memories and custom macros. ESP, using formal technique, is based on symbolic simulation to remove many of the restrictions that are imposed by the logic cone based equivalence checking.
StarRC™ Custom: Next-Generation Modeling and Extraction Solution for Custom IC Designs	IC design is facing significant challenges beyond the 40-nm process technology node because of increased process variation and its impact on circuit behavior and performance. At advanced process nodes, the increasing number of layers and new device structures result in hundreds of new parameters and many new parasitic effects, which require higher levels of accuracy in modeling and parasitic extraction for simulation and signoff analysis. Custom digital, analog/mixed-signal, and memory designs are particularly sensitive to the nanometer device parameters and parasitics. At 40-nm process technology and beyond, approximating or ignoring the new interconnect and device effects in custom designs can lead to inaccurate post-layout simulation results and jeopardize the chances of successful silicon. The Synopsys StarRC™ Custom extraction solution offers a wide range of features including advanced interconnect and device parasitic modeling and extraction that enable increased signoff accuracy and productivity for today’s system-on-chip (SoC) custom IC designs.
In-Design Rail Analysis™ Accelerates Power Network Closure	In today’s complex system-on-chip (SoC) designs, static and dynamic voltage-drop and electromigration (EM) effects are increasing. At 90 nanometer (nm) and below, these effects are having a profound impact on timing, contributing 10 to 15 percent delay sensitivity and overall design viability. Due to the performance sensitivity to power and ground (P/G) noises, rail analysis solutions that have been used in high performance networking, wireless/mobile or low-power consumer applications become critical for all design applications at advanced process nodes. These applications are facing challenges of increasing power network failures that are resulted from the increased power and current densities, technology and voltage scaling, larger die sizes, higher variance, and so on. With the increasing demands on rail analysis solutions and the complexity of the designs, the existing rail analysis solutions of checking designs upfront or at the tape-out stage are no longer sufficient. IC designers need a rail analysis solution that can easily analyze and optimize power and ground (P/G) network at any stage in the implementation flow. The solution needs to be easy to use, requires minimal setup, and provides intuitive graphical user interface for debugging, fixing, and refining. Most of all, the solution has to fit with their existing implementation flow and yet offers comprehensive P/G grid analysis.
PrimeTime Advanced OCV Technology	An accepted trend in the semiconductor industry, where process geometry is continuously shrinking, is the growing impact of variation in static timing analysis (STA). Similar to Signal Integrity (SI), which was introduced as a first order effect in 130-nm and then became more sophisticated over geometry nodes, on-chip-variation (OCV) started at 130-nm and its effects are increasing with shrinking geometry nodes. A preliminary solution to account for OCV was to apply a flat global margin across the entire chip. However, the growing impact of variation in modern designs requires an improved OCV handling capability that takes advantage of improved device-level variation techniques.
High-Level Synthesis: C / C++ for Complex Hardware Design	Over the years, the semiconductor industry has been using C/C++ high-level synthesis (HLS) tools as one way to address the complexity of implementation and verification of hardware acceleration cores due to the growing complexity of standards in video, imaging, wireless, and other multimedia and communications applications. However, these challenges have limited the adoption and scalability of these tools. This paper will discuss some of these challenges and introduce Synphony C Compiler (SCC), a new high-level synthesis product from Synopsys that includes some unique and effective technologies that address the challenges in high-level synthesis adoption.