( ESNUG 435 Item 7 ) -------------------------------------------- [12/08/04]
Subject: ( ESNUG 434 #5 ) Manny Is Fairly Happy With Jupiter-XT, Too
> I have to admit we were surprised. The only lie I found coming from
> our Synopsys sales guy was "Jupiter-XT does automatic macro placement".
> Technically speaking, Jupiter-XT did an "assisted placement". It was
> not quite automatic since we had to specify some presets. Of course,
> this is just like giving a tool some directions and constraints, but
> all we had to do afterwards was some fine-tuning.
>
> The net effect was very positive. Jupiter-XT saved us a lot of time
> compared to manually placing and replacing blocks till we got it right.
>
> - Andy Lee
> TSMC, Ltd. HsinChu, Taiwan
From: Manny Macatula <manny.macatula=user domain=conexant spot calm>
Hi John,
Our current netlist-to-GDSII flow consists of Jupiter-XT for floorplanning,
PhysOpt for placement, Astro to finish up the job, and sign-off with
PrimeTime. Astro rev is 2003.09-SP2-6.
Our physical design team is responsible for around 15 tape-outs per year
of designs ranging from a few hundred thousand instances to more than
2 million instances. Clock speeds range from 10s to 100s of MHz.
Jupiter-XT is working well for us. It's pin optimization is decent, and
that's with multiple rectilinear blocks in the design. It's PG-strap
pushdown is also a good feature to have. I like Jupiter-XT's ability
to deal with layout changes. I can manipulate abstracts, pin names,
blockages, etc. just to get by VerilogIn and start my floorplanning.
The addition of Power Network Analysis (PNA) however, is great!
I took two of our biggest chips (0.15 u, 6 LM technology) and ran it
through the PNA flow and results were available within 30 min; compared
to our current Simplex flow which takes 12 hours to run. The down side
is PNA only considers static power consumption. We'd like it to consider
dynamic power and also be able to understand and account for decoupling
caps that we can add in Astro. I was told it's in the roadmap so we
shall see.
The other good thing about Jupiter-XT is it requires very minimal input.
Since it and Astro share the same Milkyway database, iterating to achieve
acceptable PG grid is now much simpler. Its IR analysis results also
came within 10% of VoltageStorm.
- Manny Macatula
Conexant Systems, Inc. San Diego, CA
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