( DAC 04 Item 43 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 02/09/05 ]
Subject: Magma Silicon Metrics SiliconSmart CR
RATINGS -- For those who like consistency in their lives, SiliconSmart CR
is just the new marketing name for CellRater. (And its old rivals were
Circuit Semantics and Avanti Master Tool Box; but they're both gone now.)
We evaluated Magma SiliconSmart CR characterization tool:
Positives:
1. Tool Installation and Setup: The tool install procedures were
flawless. License connections, tutorial-start documents, and
customer support all flowed smoothly. The setup and start time
did not impede our other work efforts.
2. Configuration and Characterization work: SiliconSmart CR's
configuration requirements were easy for us to find, view and
modify. Magma's customer support was very helpful to distinguish
between default parameters and our specific parameters to
regulate. Cell Rater's GUI was very well organized in convenient
flow format. Modularity and portability of directory structure
was nice, too.
3. Modeling Liberty Format: The tool exported multiple formats, with
and without extensions; and supported switch sets. Got multiple
format model results -- the task was easily farmed to multiple
platforms. Concurrent processing of corners showed no conflicts.
4. Performance: SiliconSmart CR was stable, provided realtime response
and status updates and recovered from a non-vendor no fault
platform disruption. The tool performed well on Solaris 8.0 and
Linux Enterprise 3.0. Result collection repeated equally well in
multiple technology setups, w/ variation in model parameter formats.
SiliconSmart CR organized characterization of 350 0.15 technology core
cells for us. Silicon Smart CR Job Manager regulated our 6 available
HSPICE simulation licenses on a single 4 CPU Linux platform system,
Enterprise 3.0, Opteron 64 bit 2.6 MHz with 16 GBytes memory. All 350
characterizations for a selected corner were completed in an overnight
8-hour session. The modeling of all individual cells for a selected
corner and the merging of all cells in one Liberty format library
completed in less than 1/2 hour.
Magma supported HSPICE licenses shared to 3 mutually independent Linux
platforms working concurrently in parallel.
Areas for Improvement:
1. Oki did notice SiliconSmart CR misrepresented the status of cell
characterization when the tool was interrupted to modify the
allocation of CPU for the job manager. We discovered a void after
modeling had been completed and the new library was processing in
CeltIC. The bug was easy to detect as remove job feature impacted
cells, which were processing at the time the job manager was reset,
and blinked to status "done" when in fact they had not completed.
2. We would like to see Magma add an automatic refresh of status, or
audit status of cells interrupted during user requested job manager
reset.
3. We also believe a feature to automate the creation of derivative or
relative characterization points would enhance the tool's ability
to populate alternative corners. Regulation of required variations
in parameters to define a new relative characterization points may
reduce redundant repeat work.
Overall we were pleased with the correlation of cell characterization
numbers resulting in the Liberty library models. The compare to
silicon correlated legacy MTB numbers showed results as expected. The
resulting Liberty lib set with Effective Current Source Model (ECSM)
extensions did produce results CeltIC forecasted and did improve our
SDF based timing results closer to HSPICE category results.
SiliconSmart was stable, platform mobile, real time reconfigurable and
best of all achieved the expected results ahead of schedule. I
recommend it to other designers.
- James Becker of Oki Semiconductor
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