With the conventional tools, chip integration tasks like DRC and DFM cleanup, including last-minute engineering change orders (ECOs) and the adding manufacturing data, need manual, repetitive steps. Based on the company’s unified data model, Titan, Talus and Quartz DRC work efficiently together to decrease turnaround time. The Titan’s tight integration removes time-consuming, error-prone file transfers between tools and enables the system to retain the custom layout edits when other changes have to be made, so designers don’t have to re-do manual edits after each ECO. Its high capacity shortens GDSII load times of full layers and allows the GUI to offer real time interactivity even on massive data sets.
To maintain its leadership position in IC implementation, Sondrel intelligently invests in advanced electronic design automation (EDA) solutions that enable us to deliver highly complex products to market on time and on budget, stated Graham Curren, chief executive officer of Sondrel. With its proven ability to accelerate chip finishing and tight integration with Magma’s implementation and physical verification products, Titan is an excellent addition to our flow.
Incorporating custom elements into an IC greatly increases the design complexity, often causing delivery schedules to slip, stated Suk Lee, general manager of Magma’s Custom Design Business Unit. With complete, automated chip finishing and migration capabilities and integration with the digital design flow, Titan provides designers with a significant productivity boost. Sondrel’s evaluation results and adoption of Titan validate its ability to deliver high quality of results and reduce turnaround time for analog/mixed-signal ICs.
Titan: An Evolution in Analog/Mixed-Signal Design:
Analog integrated circuits are still largely full-custom and are painstakingly crafted by hand. Additionally to being time-consuming and the prone to error, this transistor-level design style does not enable an existing design to be easily transferred to a new foundry or process/technology node. Instead, the migration of such a design effectively needs the circuit to be re-implemented from the ground up. With Titan, the analog designers will still apply their expertise in defining first circuit topology, but porting to new nodes will be significantly easier.
Similar to leap in the efficiency allowed by integration into digital place-and-route flow, Titan is a giant step forward in automating and standardizing routing of analog and special signals. Through an intuitive application of the layout constraints, either interactively or fully automated via scripts, Titan performs bus routing, shielding, differential pair routing, star routing and other specific routing in a matter of minutes. Existing manual approaches may take days. This becomes especially useful in context of ECOs as rerouting can be automatically done with essentially no delay in the schedule.
