( ESNUG 475 Item 3 ) -------------------------------------------- [09/18/08]
Subject: Sequence PowerArtist/Cooltime, Calypto PowerPro, Azuro, Atrenta
DON'T LOOK HERE: There's something odd I noticed here. I know for a fact
that Synopsys, Magma, Mentor and Cadence all spend big bucks marketing their
low power solutions du jour -- yet it's Sequence, Calypto and Azuro tools
that got user mindshare for low power at this DAC.
"What were the 1 or 2 or 3 INTERESTING specific tools that you
saw at DAC this year? WHY where they interesting to you?
(If any were under NDA say it and I'll keep you anon on them.)"
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Calypto PowerPro CG:
An automated power reduction tool. Makes an RTL->RTL transformation
adding in lots of clock gating signals with some very fancy analysis.
They actually generate new signals to use for clock gating enables. They
also use activity numbers to gauge if a enable signal is needed. Also
have a formal verification tool that does equivalence check on input and
output RTL. They Claim that in an aggressively gated customer design
with 400 K flops ~50% already gated they were able to find 200 K more
enable signals. I have a free analysis tool from them that analyzes the
amount of clock gating that a design currently does.
Sequence PowerArtist:
We have a license for their Power Theater tool. They now have a Power
Artist tool that also does automated power reduction using an RTL->RTL
transformation. Unfortunately I was not able to talk in detail about
their optimization techniques all I got was something like 9 different
techniques addressing clock, memory, and datapath.
- Norm Zhou of Ambarella
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Calypto's PowerPro CG, because it offers power optimization, which could
never be done manually at (nearly) zero cost (area or performance).
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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Sequence PowerArtist. The fact that they have OA interface, new enables
added on the registers forward and backward in a pipeline to generate
more clock gating opportunities, and having PowerTheater engine for
analysis within the tool.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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1.) PowerArtist is a new tool from Sequence that in my opinion stole
the show at DAC. Both Calypto and Sequence Design will tell you that
there is a tremendous amount of wasted power in your design and help
you find it by recommending modifications to RTL, however, PowerArtist
goes much farther.
PowerArtist, altogether eleven, "PowerBots" provide multiple techniques
across historically the three most power hungry segments of RTL: clock,
memory and datapath.
Clock gate recommendations may never come if the enable for that clock
gate is missing. PowerArtist will recommend the RTL, produce the enable
and show you the power savings. PowerArtist can also optimize vectorless
which is what you would want simply because there is rarely a complete
set of applications in existence to test all permutations of the logic.
A vectorless optimization will guarantee that all applications will see
at least the recommended improvement. However, vectors can also be
used to verify the results.
PowerArtist has a well designed user interface, Power Canvas. Cross
probing RTL to a very readable generated schematic, sorting/filtering,
analysis windows and a list of prioritized RTL changes work together very
well to provide the perfect RTL "Design for Power" environment.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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I was really interested in Sequence Cooltime's clock jitter analysis
using dynamic IR drop information. Not too many tools handle this and
Sequence seems to be a frontier vendor taking this challenge on. I've
have my core clock signals jitter due to dynamic IR drop noise which
caused problems. Lots of companies have voltage compression requirements
to help alleviate this problem but I think an actual timing analysis is
very valuable.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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Azuro CTS - made with amazing understanding of CTS complexity, no one
else implement the CTS with such attention.
- Dalia Karmon of Zoran
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My focus being power, I have relied on SpyGlass to get closure on some
of the most complex low power designs (multiple dynamic power domains).
With our Synopsys synthesis and layout flow, Atrenta helped us avoid
show stopper problems during tape-out.
- Hongyu Xie of Marvell Semi
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Atrenta 1-Team
For its capability to do power analysis right early in the design flow.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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One interesting product in DAC this year was the Atrenta 1Team-Genesis
product. This allows early exploration. Claims to do what-if arch
analysis and generate assembled RTL. Supposedly correct by construction.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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