Magma introduces quartz DRC
By agencies   |   Tuesday, 12 July 2005, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Magma Design Automation Inc., a provider of semiconductor design software, today announced the availability of Quartz DRC, a key component of Magma’s recently announced Cobra 2005.03 release and a result of Magma’s acquisition of Mojave Design. Quartz DRC is architected to process integrated circuit (IC) designs of any size, at any technology node, in two hours or less. It is the first truly scalable physical verification tool, able to provide turnaround time that is up to an order of magnitude faster than existing solutions. Quartz DRC does so by applying fine-grain parallelism across a standard network ( of heterogeneous Linux machines. “Magma believes that Quartz DRC, and future products based on the Mojave technology, will revolutionize the physical verification and DFM (design for manufacturability) markets. The ability to process any design in less than two hours is a revolutionary breakthrough and one that has received tremendous response from our customer base. Additionally, this new architecture provides very accurate and efficient modeling of lithographic and CMP (chemical-mechanical polishing) effects that dominate manufacturability at 90 nanometers (nm) and below, and we are integrating this technology into our design and flow. With Quartz DRC, design-rule-checking (DRC) time is linear with the number of CPUs, so designers are able to choose the turnaround time that best suits their project needs,” said Dr. Anand Anandkumar, managing director, Magma Design Automation India,“ adding, “A two-hour turnaround time could save more than a week at the end of the project schedule compared to other commercial products, allowing multiple turns of any full-chip physical design to be made in a single business day.” Quartz DRC was beta tested with select semiconductor and fabless design companies, including Broadcom, NVIDIA and TSMC. All designs tested during the Beta period ran in less than two hours, with peak memory usage up to 10 times less than competitive tools. All runs were completed within 32-bit hardware limits. During the Beta test period, Magma worked with the leading foundry, TSMC, to validate the accuracy and performance of Quartz DRC for production on 90- and 65-nm processes

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