Digital designs are reaching 10's of millions of instances,
which makes efficiency of the overall digital implementation and signoff flow
critical to ensure predictability in the design schedule. A major
stumbling block that can be a real threat to that predictability is iterations
between different stages of the design flow. There are multiple reasons why
this happens but one that should not happen is because you have two design
stages giving you two different answers with the same set of data.
The most common, and likely the most costly, is when your
implementation tool disagrees with your signoff analysis or extraction tool. At
this late stage in the design flow, fixes are costly and time consuming. Also,
how do you know which is right? Did your implementation tool miss something or
is your signoff tool too pessimistic?
Adding margin to your implementation tool for timing or
power is one way to mitigate this problem but this can be costly in several
ways:
-
Degrades
chip performance when timing margins are already tight
-
Area
and power consumption will increase
-
Makes
your optimization work longer and harder to close timing - major productivity
killer
The easy way around this dilemma is leverage high-precision
tools which use the signoff analysis and extraction engines to drive
implementation. This way your analysis results are consistent and convergent
throughout the flow and you don't get any surprises at the end during signoff.
You can essentially catch problems early in the design process which makes them
much easier to fix.
It's for this exact reason that Cadence has integrated
our signoff analysis and extraction technologies into our implementation
environment. Our production proven signoff technologies - Encounter Power
System for power analysis, Encounter Timing System for timing and signal
integrity, and QRC for digital extraction are built-in the Encounter Digital
Implementation (EDI) System. Since we've done this, our users have seen some
major productivity benefits when using the complete solution.
A bonus is that, with this integration, you can also signoff
during implementation if you like without going to a separate signoff tool. In
fact, we have many customers doing just that at 65nm and above where the number
of timing and power runs for signoff are much less. This eliminates the need to
re-run your timing and power analysis in a different session or tool. Also, it
allows the implementation environment to take immediate advantage of the latest
analysis capabilities such as advanced OCV, statistical timing, thermal
analysis, technology files, etc. to fix design problems instead of just finding
them.
You may be wondering... will this slow me down if I'm using
signoff engines at every stage? Actually, in this case an ounce of prevention
saves you a ton of iterations. And, with the latest developments in mult-CPU
performance and capacity of our analysis and extraction solutions, the flow
stages are actually much faster.
In
short, you should always be doing implementation with signoff in mind so there
are no surprises. Signoff-driven implementation = consistent &
convergent = predictable & efficient
Mike Jacobs