Synopsys - Galaxy Constraint Analyzer improves designer productivity

“Our complex SoC designs have a large number of clocks that require an intricate set of timing constraint definitions,” said Hitoshi Sugihara, department manager of the DFM & Digital EDA Technology Development Dept., Design Technology Div., Renesas Technology Corp. “Making sure that our design engineers start with and hand-off a high quality set of constraint files significantly lowers risk to our design schedules. Using the Galaxy Constraint Analyzer enabled us to find constraint issues that we could not have found otherwise, saving us significant time and effort. We plan to incorporate the Galaxy Constraint Analyzer into our standard design flow that includes Design Compiler and IC Compiler.”

The rapid increase in design size and complexity, as well as the widespread reuse of intellectual property (IP) design blocks, has lead to a major increase in the size and complexity of timing constraint specification files. Ensuring high quality timing constraints is paramount to efficient design implementation, especially during handoffs between teams. Incomplete, inconsistent or conflicting constraints can cause optimisation and implementation tools to run ineffectively or to never converge. To address this challenge, the Galaxy Constraint Analyzer tool provides an extensive set of rule checks designed to maximise the efficiency of Design Compiler synthesis and IC Compiler physical implementation. In addition, Galaxy Constraint Analyzer uses technology based on Synopsys’ golden PrimeTime(R) timing engine to ensure correct interpretation and propagation of constraints. This gives designers a signoff-correlated view of the constraints ahead of each step of the design implementation process. Galaxy Constraint Analyzer’s ability to deliver comprehensive constraint analysis on 10-million-gate designs in a matter of minutes, combined with a unique set of interactive analysis and debug capabilities, helps designers quickly identify and fix constraint issues within hours versus days.

“Constraint analysis is becoming a crucial step to ensure an efficient design implementation process,” said Robert Hoogenstryd, director of marketing for design analysis and signoff at Synopsys. “However, in order for a constraint analysis tool to be effective, it has to interpret and analyse constraint specifications in a manner that is consistent and correlated with signoff. We built the Galaxy Constraint Analyzer using technology based on the PrimeTime golden timing engine to help designers produce the highest quality constraints for the Galaxy Implementation Platform.”