"During a recent 45-nanometer tapeout, using the PrimeTime advanced OCV feature helped us achieve a 5X reduction in the number of timing violations we needed to analyze and fix, saving us a significant amount of schedule time," said Hitoshi Sugihara, department manager of the DFM & Digital EDA Technology Development Dept., Design Technology Div., Renesas Technology. "We collaborated with Synopsys early in the development of this methodology to ensure it was easy to deploy, and have confirmed its signoff accuracy versus both HSPICE Monte-Carlo (or statistical) simulation and actual silicon. The PrimeTime advanced OCV capability is now deployed as a standard part of our timing signoff flows at 65 nanometers and below."
Synopsys' PrimeTime advanced OCV technology provides more finely-tuned design margins in timing analysis by incorporating logic-depth information to determine path-specific and cell-specific margin values. Using simple derate tables to complement the global derate methodology that has been used for many years to account for on-chip variation allows PrimeTime customers to take advantage of the more finely-tuned design margins with minimal changes to existing timing signoff scripts. The PrimeTime advanced OCV capability is part of a comprehensive set of variation-aware design solutions offered by Synopsys that also includes the PrimeTime VX statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) tool. While mainstream designs can readily take advantage of the PrimeTime advanced OCV solution, the PrimeTime VX solution provides further benefits for high-performance designs targeting advanced process technology nodes.
"The industry has welcomed PrimeTime's advanced OCV capability based on ease of adoption and effectiveness in accurately modeling on-chip variations," said Ahsan Bootehsaz, vice president of Research and Development, Synopsys Implementation Group. "By closely collaborating with leading semiconductor companies such as Renesas, we continue to bring innovative features to PrimeTime to help companies address their immediate design challenges, significantly boosting their designers' productivity."