Partnership accelerates robust design optimisation

While designers have been using ANSYS and Synopsys tools in combination for years, the integrated solution will enable mutual customers to apply power integrity and reliability signoff technologies earlier in the design flow – empowering them to deliver innovative, high-performance and reliable products faster, while reducing power, area and cost.

The integration of ANSYS' platform for chip power and reliability signoff, ANSYS RedHawk, with Synopsys' place-and-route solutions, Synopsys IC Compiler II, will provide users earlier signoff accuracy within the Synopsys design environment. This integration will enable rapid design exploration, design weakness detection, optimisation and thermal-aware reliability through increased functionality within the place-and-route environment. The in-design power integrity and reliability signoff-driven flow will eliminate late design changes and ensure consistency with final chip-package-system signoff analyses with RedHawk.

"This partnership is a continued step in Synopsys' strategy to bring more physical and signoff technologies earlier in the design flow within our Synopsys Digital Design Platform," said Sassine Ghazi, Senior Vice President and Co-general Manager, Design Group at Synopsys. "Partnering with ANSYS enables Synopsys to quickly deliver a reliability and thermal-driven design flow that is critical for designing the next generation of semiconductors."

Synopsys and ANSYS will also provide a feedback loop between the two-gold standard solutions, Synopsys PrimeTime and ANSYS RedHawk. Voltage-aware timing analysis can be performed rapidly to avoid additional guard-banding and design margining.

"As the industry moves to more and more complex chips, signoff-driven rail analysis needs to be available sooner in the physical design flow just like timing and design rule checking," said John Lee, General Manager at ANSYS. "We believe partnering with Synopsys to bring our signoff technology into the Synopsys In-Design approach is the right way to accomplish this objective."

"TSMC collaborates with our EDA partners on silicon design solutions to enable our customers to achieve competitive performance, power and area for their next generation electronic products," said Suk Lee, TSMC Senior Director, Design Infrastructure Marketing Division. "This industry collaboration between Synopsys and ANSYS provides an opportunity for them to take the collaboration a step further by enabling reliability and thermal-driven physical design built on the industry's popular physical implementation and signoff solutions."

"ARM has been a long-time user of both Synopsys and ANSYS technologies, which have helped in the development of some of the most sophisticated CPU cores available in the market," said Hobson Bullman, Vice President and General Manager, TSG, ARM. "This announced partnership will enable our semiconductor partners to optimise our IP within their SoC designs earlier in the flow allowing more time to focus on reliable, robust and energy efficient designs."

"Both Synopsys and ANSYS have been strong collaboration partners with MediaTek to manage increasing manufacturing complexity and to deliver designs on schedule while realising aggressive performance, power and area goals," said SA Hwang, General Manager of Design Technology, MediaTek. "We believe this new partnership between Synopsys and ANSYS will enable MediaTek engineers to accelerate their pace of innovation while achieving further power, performance and area optimisations."

ANSYS and Synopsys will be featured at the Design Automation Conference in booth 647 and booth 147 respectively, from 18th to 22nd June in Austin, Texas.