The main goals of the enhancements included reducing runtime to meet customer turnaround time requirements, improving ease of design team adoption and enhancing optimization quality for better leakage power and variability reduction, Blaze (Sunnyvale, Calif.) said.

"We've seen tremendous results at our customers in terms of reducing leakage power and leakage variability, resulting in substantial, double-digit gains in parametric yield," said Jacob Jacobsson, Blaze CEO. "With the improvements that we've made in Blaze MO release 1.1, we offer even more compelling bottom-line benefits to companies designing sub-100nm chips."

From internal benchmarks performed on customer designs, release 1.1 is up to five times faster than the previous version, Blaze said. The new release also includes advances to every major function of the software, the company said, and offers patent-pending auto-correlation to existing golden timing and signal integrity signoff tools.

Blaze MO's analysis engines have been enhanced to account for leakage variation caused by both systematic and random sources, Blaze said. The optimization engine was enhanced to support process-window awareness when choosing among available variants and the annotation flow was extended to support manufacturability awareness in the generation of optical proximity correction (OPC) directives, the company said.

Blaze MO Release 1.1 is available now on all supported hardware platforms as a free upgrade for customers under current maintenance agreements, Blaze said.