ECO technology offers flexible distribution and cuts compute costs

The significant increase in efficiency enables signoff-accurate ECO with all scenarios on a single, affordable compute server or the flexibility to distribute across customers' private compute cloud to take advantage of smaller more readily available machines.

"Our customers want to continue to use their existing investment in compute hardware, even as their designs continue to grow in size," said Robert Hoogenstryd, Senior Director of Marketing, for design analysis and signoff tools at Synopsys. "To that end, our new PrimeTime release provides smarter, more resource-efficient technology for timing closure and ECO to improve signoff schedules and reduce risk."

Flexible cost reductions of ECO runs
Employing smarter and more efficient ECO techniques, this PrimeTime release delivers single-pass fix rates of 95%+ using 5x less memory and with 2x faster runtimes. As a result, PrimeTime users can reduce their resource usage in several ways. The first option is to use significantly fewer large-memory machines by packing more scenarios on a single server. This reduces the potentially long wait times for access to multiple rarer machines. As a second option, users can utilise common, readily available, small-memory compute slots by distributing the scenarios across their private compute cloud. This option virtually eliminates wait times. Both of these options can provide significant cost savings and reductions to signoff schedules, while utilising current compute resources.

Signoff ECO of All Scenarios on a Single Box or Distributed to Multiple Boxes

Design Size Resources Needed Scenarios Runtime

Option 1) 100M Instances one 256 Gigabyte Machine 8 Scenarios --> 3.5 Hours

Option 2) 100M Instances eight 32 Gigabyte Machines 8 Scenarios --> 3.5 Hours

"In delivering our innovative automotive infotainment products to our partners, efficiency and dependability are critical to our combined success," said Yasunori Matsumoto, Chief Professional of Backend Design Department 1, Development Division 4 at Renesas System Design Co., Ltd. "Synopsys PrimeTime delivers the accurate timing analysis and high ECO fix rates we need. Having the flexibility the new PrimeTime ECO technology provides will help our teams meet their demanding schedules while utilising our existing compute resources."