Cadence Design Systems, Inc. today announced that MaxLinear, Inc. used the Cadence® Innovus™ Implementation System on a multi-million instance 28 nanometer chip, significantly improving both area and turnaround time.
Leveraging the capacity and runtime advantage of the Innovus Implementation System, MaxLinear was able to move from a hierarchical methodology to a flat design flow, achieving 10 percent die-size area savings using a minimum number of metal layers. MaxLinear also reduced runtime from four-and-a-half days to just over a day when compared with its previous solution.
The Innovus Implementation System provides high-quality placement optimization via the new GigaPlace placement engine, which enabled MaxLinear to implement multi-million cell blocks while realizing significant die-size area savings. In addition, Innovus Implementation System features core algorithms, including for placement, that have been enhanced with multi-threading to provide significant speedup on industry-standard hardware with 8 to 16 CPUs.
“Our products enable the reception of broadband data and video content, requiring high levels of performance, small silicon die-size, and rapid time to market,” said Dr. Paolo Miliozzi, senior director, SOC Technology and Physical Design at MaxLinear. “Innovus Implementation System has provided us with unprecedented full-flow speed-up, so we can deliver reliable designs to market faster. Moving to a flat design flow using Innovus Implementation System enabled significant area gains while reducing the turnaround time to about a day.”
“The Innovus Implementation System was designed to improve the overall productivity of physical design engineering teams, and we’ve seen many customers, including MaxLinear, improve both quality of results and turnaround time simultaneously,” said Dr. Anirudh Devgan, senior vice president of the Digital and Signoff Group at Cadence. “Achieving die-size area savings and significantly faster runtime enabled reduced development costs for these large designs.”
For more information on the Innovus Implementation System, the Cadence next-generation physical implementation solution, please visit www.cadence.com/news/innovus. Also, see today’s related press release titled, “Cadence Introduces Innovus Implementation System, Delivering Best-in-Class Results with Up to 10X Reduction in Turnaround Time,” at www.cadence.com/cadence/newsroom/press_releases/pages/pr.aspx?xml=031015_Innovus.
Source: http://www.cadence.com/