( ESNUG 499 Item 2 ) -------------------------------------------- [02/23/12]
Subject: Users voting to save Magma Titan and FineSim
NEW APPROACH: Users say the Titan/FineSim combination shortens their circuit
optimization and migration time. In the custom design war, Synopsys Custom
Designer has had trouble making any inroads into Cadence's home turf here.
Titan might give SNPS an angle that could help in this uphill battle.
"Assuming the Synopsys-Magma merger goes through, as a Magma user,
which specific Magma tools do you want to survive and why?"
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Hi John,
I hope they save Titan ALX, Magma's analog layout migration product.
We have been working with Magma to make Titan our tool of choice in our
layout migration flow and so far we have seen very good results.
Prior to Titan ALX we used another product from one of the "larger"
vendors. However, our design team required us to obey the DFM rules
when migrating various blocks from TSMC 90 nm to 45 nm, and our prior
solution struggled to support this. Magma, on the other hand, already
had technology files set up that supported the strict DFM requirements.
Magma has an elegant solution that gives very clean results. In our
production design we migrated over 30 blocks very cleanly both with 100%
and 50% shrinks. Once our migration flow was in place, we could turn
around 2-10 blocks a week on average, dependent on the block's size and
complexity. We are now migrating another production design from TSMC
0.25um to Dongbu 0.18um (with isolated well structures) and are seeing
similar results.
An important feature of the Titan architecture is that Titan ALX always
completes to a "feasible" solution; with other migration tools, the
migration stops because the solution becomes "infeasible." Magma
achieves this by relaxing the layout in areas that have been
problematic; this approach also makes it easy to debug. We have had
great support from Magma AE and R&D teams; one of the big positives for
us is that the migration technology files for a given PDK (Process
Design Kit) are developed and supported by Magma.
In contrast, with our previous tool we were supplied with an example
technology file (if one existed) and left to tune the file for our
specific technology. The previous tool also took significant vendor AE
support in developing a migration flow due to its complexity. The
important difference is that Magma takes ownership of the development of
the technology files of the various PDK technology nodes instead of
having the customer taking on all of the risk and much of the effort for
developing migration flows for a specific technology node.
Our big concern now that we have a solid production flow in place is
whether it will survive or not.
- Michael Martin of IDT
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FineSim is my favorite. In today's very complicated designs where
designers integrate IPs from different vendors and put a lot of energy
to verify the integrated system, I see the tool which is able to run a
fast Spice simulation as a big bonus. FineSim is very simple to learn
and use. Its capacity is very good as well.
We were able to run a full chip simulation with all the parasitics in a
matter of hours.
Here is an example of one of our blocks:
# MOSFET ~2.5M
# Diode ~20K
# Resistor ~4.5M
# Capacitor ~27M
# SPF Res ~60K
# SPF Cap ~110K
FineSim's transient analysis went through 75 K time points, and the
elapsed time of the whole simulation was less than 2 hours.
- Roman Trogan of Adapteva
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
We design customer specific ICs for power management and I/O circuits
across many different process technologies, from multiple foundries.
We have used Magma Titan analog platform and FineSim simulator in our
design flow for 2 years, from schematic capture to simulation to layout,
and we are very pleased with the outcome. The flow is easy to use and
quick to learn.
1) An experienced custom IC designer hardly requires a day or
two to become productive.
2) It's easy to run multiple tests and the results are displayed
in a sorted manner.
3) The schematic fonts are not so great and need improvement.
At front end, we found the Titan + FineSim simulation analog environment
delivers results about 1.5 to 2 times faster than other tools that we
have used in the past, while maintaining accuracy on complex power
management analog blocks.
It saved us about 3-4 weeks in completing the frontend design, and we
validated the results in silicon.
At the backend, Titan's layout redraw, refresh, zoom, pan speeds are
great. We found the tool to be complete and reliable for most of all
our design requirements. We were also impressed by the excellent
support from Magma; they were eager to help us succeed and the fast
turnaround times for enhancements and bugs - most of the time the issues
were resolved within 2 days.
We would definitely like the Titan + FineSim and its design flow to
survive post-merger, and it will be a pity if these tools get
discontinued.
- Mohammad Suhaib of SiWays Microelectronics
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
At my company we focus on high-speed and high-performance analog and
mixed-signal circuits. Among these are multi-giga sample ADCs, DACs,
digital PLLs, and SerDes. All of these are notoriously difficult to
simulate and the simulation time-accuracy problem is exacerbated when
one adds layout parasitics.
FineSim has proven to be an invaluable tool for simulating these
circuits with full layout-extracted parasitics. We have documented
significant reduction in simulation time compared to our previous
simulator, without loss of accuracy, and some circuits which,
heretofore, would not be simulated with full R+C+Cc parasitics, can
now be simulated. Listed below are some examples of performance
improvements:
Circuit Simulation Speed-up
--------------- ---------- --------
6 GHz LC DCO Transient 6x
8b 16GS/s DAC Transient 40x
9b 2GS/s ADC Transient 5x
12b 750MS/s ADC Transient 4x
27 MHz XTAL w/ FM Transient 10x
Despite the impressive performance in transient simulations, FineSim
needs significant improvements in its AC performance to be accepted as
a general-purpose mixed-signal simulator. I believe that, with
improvements, FineSim has the potential to be a strong competitor for
dominance in mixed-signal simulation.
- Ralph Duncan of Mobius Semiconductor
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Titan ADX is the only circuit optimization tool in the market, no other
EDA vendor offer this kind of tool before. So it should be saved.
When we did a Titan ADX evaluation, to find out how efficient this tool
was, we had one of our design team manually design a "bandgap" circuit
versus using the ADX. It took about 3 weeks to finish the "bandgap"
while it only took 3 days for ADX to meet the design specs.
The Titan ADX optimized "bandgap" had better performance than the manual
design.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
We have been benchmarking Titan SBR (shaped-based router) against the
other tools that we have purchased. We found Titan SBR gives the
density and the fast turnaround time needed to do our complex designs.
The router we purchased a while back used other types of routing to try
and mimic the true River Routing found in Titan SBR. For example, our
other route router would use bus routing to route the design. Only in
Titan SBR can we define a routing path for true river routing.
We create designs that require routing multiple routes in very narrow
channels, which lends itself ideally to River Routing. The other
router's setup time and automatic routing time were comparable to Titan
SBR; however, its error handling and cleanup could take several minutes
to several hours, while Titan SBR can achieve the routing in just
seconds and cleanup was very easy and efficient.
To me some of the true characteristics of river routing are:
Point to point routing with no wire cross over
Single layer metals, no vias
Pin checking (especially for reuse and debug)
Routing on a defined grid, independent of spacing requirements
Ability to define routing path
Our design consisted of 186 nets divided into 5 groups for River
Routing. Titan SBR was easy to use; we basically just defined the
routing path and then let the router do the rest. Conflicts such as
missing or misaligned pins, pins placed on wrong metal layer, or
channels that were too constrictive were either resolved or Titan SBR
provided clear, meaningful error reporting.
There is also a script that allows the user to automatically create the
group of nets to be River Routed.
One of the improvements I would like to see is to enhance the shielding
of the wires. We have a very unique structure that we would like to
follow when doing shielding.
- Eddie Wald of Vitesse
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