Celestry adds full-chip, gate-level power analysis to its Nautilus signal integrity product line
Celestry™ Design Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of Silicon Accurate Sign-off™ physical analysis solutions for the semiconductor and electronics industry, today announced that it is introducing a new cell based product for power analysis: Nautilus-VT™. Nautilus-VT adds voltage and electromigration (EM) analysis critical for high performance SoC products fabricated in 0.18 µ technology and below to the Nautilus signal integrity (SI) product line.
Nautilus-VT improves timing and reliability with its pre-silicon power analysis. It compares a circuit's power consumption with the design's power budget by taking into account added IR-drop analysis and electromigration issues that affect circuit timing closure and reliability.
"Nautilus-VT reflects our efforts of embedding our DSM physics knowledge into our leading full-chip physical analysis solutions. This extends our sign-off solutions that identify problems to now start helping solve problems," said Dr. Zhihong Liu, CEO and President of Celestry. "For silicon accuracy, Nautilus has already been proven a necessity for 0.25 µ and below designs. However, for 0.18 µ and below, Nautilus-VT provides the additional critical links to silicon accurate sign-off between a design's layout data and its final chip timing, power and reliability measurements," added Dr. Liu.
Nautilus-VT passes VIA's tests
"In the design test case we provided, Nautilus-VT identified all the IR-drop violation spots we intentionally put in. We see a lot of promise in this product and will look into having it in our production sign-off flow for 0.18 micron and below technology, " noted Alan Liaw, Director of R&D Division, at VIA Technologies, Inc., one of the Nautilus-VT beta site. "We were very impressed by Celestry's engineering and support teams, in US and Taiwan, for their quick response."
About Celestry's Nautilus-VT
Nautilus-VT is the most complete SI solution that now also includes IR drop specific extraction capabilities and IR drop determination from the extracted RC data. This IR drop data is used for determining hot spots and for determining total power. The IR drop data is then converted directly to delay information. Only by converting IR Drop data into delay analysis can a designer be assured of their dynamic timing. This converting IR drop to delay is unique to Celestry. Nautilus-VT includes 3D layout extraction, timing and power modeling, delay analysis, chip power estimation, power net analysis, electromigration analysis, clock skew calculation, SDF comparisons and signal integrity analysis. It provides signal and power net extraction along with accurate coupling noise analysis, cell power estimation and instance specific IR-drop information for timing calculations.
Nautilus-VT features a fast solver with an advanced algorithm for power net and EM analysis and includes all the capabilities of the Nautilus-SI product previously offered by Celestry. Its Iterative power net analysis delivers high accuracy. For example, Nautilus-VT accuracy is within ± 10% of SPICE. and it runs 1000X faster than SPICE. It can easily analyze multi-million cell netlists that contain parasitic RC data. Users can attain even more silicon accurate results by using Celestry's patented DirectNode™ interconnect calibration services, which provide resolution to 0.001 femto farad.
About Celestry's Nautilus product family
Nautilus is the industry's first and most complete full-chip, signal integrity verification solution for multi-million cell designs and now includes Nautilus-VT. The Nautilus family of products offers cell and transistor parameter and parasitic extraction, RC reduction, delay calculation, IR-drop (voltage) and electromigration analysis. Nautilus fits in with all the current cell-based design flows, such as Place & Route tools, and can be used for high-end ASICs, COT, ASSP and microprocessor designs.
Price and availability
Nautilus-VT for Sun-Solaris and HP-UX are shipping now. Nautilus-VT prices start at $199,000 (USD), which includes; extraction, delay analysis, signal integrity and power features.
About VIA Technologies, Inc. (VIA)
VIA Technologies, Inc. is the world's leading fabless supplier of core logic chipsets, x86 processors, and communications and networking chips for PCs and Internet Appliances. VIA's products enhance the power, usefulness, and value of PCs and Internet Appliances by enabling superior performance, better connectivity, improved visual computing capabilities, and faster, easier Internet access.
For more information about VIA Technologies, Inc., visit www.viatech.com or www.via.com.tw.
About Celestry
Celestry is the leading provider of design solutions that enable IC and SoC designers to achieve optimal performance from semiconductor process technologies — solutions that help close the gap between potential nanometer technology performance and the performance of ICs and SoCs. The Company delivers a comprehensive suite of modeling, simulation, physical analysis and physical synthesis tools and services for developing digital, mixed-signal and analog ICs and SoCs that are used in networking, communication, multimedia and computing products.
For more information visit www.celestry.com or email info@celestry.com.
Source: Celestry