Magma Enables ZiiLABS to Double the Performance, Cut Power by Half on 100-Core ZMS-40 Processor

By doubling the number of StemCell Media processors compared to the previous ZMS-20, the ZMS-40 delivers twice the peak media performance. Alternatively, the ZMS-40’s larger array can be run at lower clock speeds to achieve the same performance as the ZMS-20 while consuming up to 50 percent less power. The Magma software was instrumental in enabling ZiiLABS to tape out the ZMS40 while maintaining an aggressive design schedule. As a result of this latest success, ZiiLABS will deploy the Talus® 1.2 IC implementation system, Tekton™ static timing analysis, QCP™ extraction, FineSim™ SPICE circuit simulation and Quartz™ DRC/LVS physical verification solutions on its next-generation designs.

In 2000 ZiiLABS, then 3Dlabs, was the first company ever to tape out a design using Magma’s then nascent IC implementation software. In commemoration of the first tape out and in recognition of ZiiLABS’ latest design milestone, Magma presented ZiiLABS’ Vice President of Technical Strategy, Paul Pontin, with the SiliconOne Leadership award.

“For over a decade, Magma has been instrumental in allowing us to meet our customers’ ever-increasing demands for innovation, phenomenal performance and value, said Pontin. “Magma software continues to provide the most advanced features, capacity and turnaround time and the company’s responsive and professional engineering support gives us complete confidence in our ability to achieve silicon success.”

“Our close, long-term relationship with ZiiLABS has been invaluable in helping us understand the changing requirements of the exploding handheld and tablet computing market,” said Premal Buch. “As a result, we’ve been able to leverage the tight integration enabled by Magma’s unified datamodel to develop a flow that provides better efficiency and higher productivity while streamlining deployment.”

Magma: An Advanced Flow for Complex, Next-Generation Designs
The Magma flow provides several key capabilities that ensure better quality of results and faster turnaround time for complex, next-generation designs. The Talus IC implementation solution includes advanced placement technology, robust multi-mode multi-corner (MMMC) clock tree synthesis and advanced on-chip variation (AOCV)-aware full-flow MMMC optimization, allowing designers to meet top-level timing goals and ensure that total chip area is minimized. Tekton performs extremely fast, multi-scenario analysis on a single machine and provides the accuracy of existing sign-off solutions. The QCP extractor provides near-linear scalability on multi-processor machines as well as highly efficient distributed processing to handle increasing design sizes and the exploding number of corner scenarios at 28 nm. FineSim SPICE multi-CPU/multi-machine circuit simulator enables the simulation of very large analog/mixed-signal designs with true SPICE accuracy. Quartz DRC/LVS is the first truly scalable physical verification solution, able to provide turnaround time that is up to an order of magnitude faster than existing solutions while using existing compute resources.