Magma Design Automation Inc. unveiled Tekton, a new static timing analysis (STA) platform that offers significantly higher capacity and dramatically faster runtimes than traditional STA tools, without sacrificing accuracy. Unlike other solutions, Tekton runs multi-scenario analysis on low-cost hardware without requiring a large number of expensive servers and software licenses. Leveraging breakthrough technology, this revolutionary new platform addresses complex sign-off challenges and is suited for today's most challenging designs. Its next generation architecture offers the speed, capacity, and accuracy required for the industry's toughest designs. According to Rajeev Madhavan, Chairman and CEO, who announced the new product during the Magma Users Group meeting in San Jose, the new product has been engineered from scratch to meet the challenges of execution speed and accuracy presented by today's designs.

For those who like to know where the name of the product came from, I can offer two origins. The word "tekton" is a Greek word that means "one who constructs", and thus Magma is saying that this product will help designers construct their IC. But, sticking with the geological nature, typically volcanic, of Magma's products, tekton is the Greek root of the English word tectonics, and can be found as a proper name to describe plate tectonics, the origins of earthquakes. Thus the product name would fall into the Magma family tree. I am sure that Magam plans to create a earthquake in the market sector.

Designed to more efficiently handle on-chip-variation (OCV), composite current source (CCS) models and crosstalk analysis, Tekton overcomes the speed, capacity and accuracy limitations of traditional STA tools. It brings a new level of performance to static timing analysis and extraction while maintaining complete flow compatibility with existing STA tools. The Tekton platform includes Tekton QCP, a fast, high-capacity, full-chip extractor that delivers results with the accuracy of the industry standard, QuickCap. Tekton QCP's architecture enables efficient multi-corner extraction with minimal increases in runtime as additional process, voltage and temperature (PVT) corners are added for each process node migration. Tekton and Tekton QCP can be used together in a single STA timing session for very fast and accurate "what-if" analysis for engineering change orders (ECOs).

The Tekton platform meets the runtime, capacity and accuracy requirements for sign-off through an architecture designed to accommodate more than 100 million instances and greater than 15 PVT corners. Traditional STA solutions often take days and numerous machines to deliver results on complicated designs that have many analysis scenarios. Tekton's multi-threaded architecture provides near-linear scaling on up to 24 CPUs. For a single timing scenario, with OCV and crosstalk enabled, Tekton performs timing analysis on designs greater than 10 million cells in minutes. When 5, 10, 24, 27 or 54 scenarios are enabled, Tekton performs timing analysis, with OCV and crosstalk enabled, in less than one hour on a single CPU.

Incremental Extraction With Tekton QCP

Today's complex chip designs require accurate timing analysis to be performed across many scenarios (operating modes and PVT corners). Coupling Tekton's timing analysis with Tekton QCP's incremental extraction in a single session offers designers the ability to simultaneously iterate through the timing closure process of analyzing, fixing and incrementally extracting nets. The ability to make changes and instantly get accurate timing results can drastically reduce the amount of time spent in trial-and-error ECO loops.

More on Tekton

Performing multi-mode/multi-corner or multi-scenario analysis using traditional tools is time consuming, expensive and cumbersome. Design teams are often forced to purchase many expensive servers and accompanying software licenses to parallelize the multi-scenario analysis in order to shorten run times. In some cases, design teams resort to using abstracted timing models to accelerate the analysis, but at the expense of accuracy. Tekton performs extremely fast, multi-scenario analysis on a single machine and provides the accuracy of existing sign-off solutions.

To address the timing closure challenges design teams face at 40 nm and below, Tekton supports advanced OCV (A-OCV) margin reduction techniques. By incorporating A-OCV into timing closure flows, design teams can minimize global pessimistic margins that lengthen tapeout schedules and potentially increase die sizes. For critical path and net analysis, Tekton and Tekton QCP offer high accuracy modes that leverage Tekton's integrated SPICE engine and Tekton QCP's accurate extraction.

"Today, companies are budgeting millions of dollars for hardware to address the rapidly increasing number of STA scenarios," said Premal Buch, general manager of Magma's Design Implementation Business Unit. "Tekton is the only STA solution that meets the multi-scenario analysis problems of today and five years from now – on a single machine without any investment in new hardware."

Availability

Tekton and Tekton QCP are in limited release. General availability will begin in June 2010.