Portland, Oregon, April 3, 2013 – FishTail Design Automation, Inc., the golden timing constraints company, today announced that Japan’s Semiconductor Technology Academic Research Center (STARC) has completed a study of FishTail’s solution for merging multi-mode design constraints. This study has demonstrated that FishTail’s products drastically reduce STA runtime without any compromise on timing accuracy.
STARC engineers conducted a detailed study of FishTail’s mode-merging solution on a 4 million cell instance SoC with 700K flops. The design had 18 design modes, each with 10 timing corners, resulting in a total of 180 STA verification scenarios. FishTail’s Focus product was used to merge the 18 modes into one super mode, reducing the total number of STA scenarios to 10. The accuracy of FishTail’s automatically generated super mode constraint file was verified using a FishTail provided verification procedure that runs in third-party STA tools. This verification procedure was used to compare setup and hold timing slack between the super mode constraint and original multi-mode constraints with propagated clocks and crosstalk delay calculation turned on. Verification results showed that the timing slack optimism on all endpoints with super mode constraints correlated within 5 ps of their value with multi-mode constraints and timing slack pessimism within 100ps. Further, STA runtime to verify the 10 super-mode scenarios was 12% of the runtime to verify the original 180 multi-mode scenarios. Accounting for the time taken to generate and verify the super mode constraint file, overall runtime for timing signoff was reduced by 56%.
“Our study showed that FishTail’s automated mode-merging solution provides the accuracy required for static timing signoff,” said Takashi Aikyo, vice president and general manager at STARC. “We expect that the accuracy of FishTail’s mode-merging solution coupled with its ability to shorten the timing closure process will be of significant value to our member companies.”
“This announcement is incredibly important” stated Ajay Daga, founder and CEO of FishTail. “STARC’s study has shown that FishTail’s mode merging solution cuts STA runtime by about 90% without loss of accuracy. We have previously demonstrated our ability, using the same mode merging technology, to cut P&R runtimes by 50% without adversely impacting QoR. We provide customers the opportunity to significantly reduce their chip-implementation costs by reducing their investment in STA and P&R licenses.”
About FishTail Design Automation
Founded in 2002, FishTail Design Automation has set its sights on tackling the difficult problem of obtaining correct and complete design constraints. The company’s patented technology improves chip implementation and static timing signoff by automatically generating, verifying and managing design constraints. FishTail is privately funded. For more information, please visit the company’s website at www.fishtail-da.com.
