Magma's Talus Vortex FX claims higher throughput for multimillion-cell designs

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Also, the COre technology is very much still embedded in the Talus Vortex flow, Richards noted. "However, that flow paradigm has been further optimized to ensure optimal crosstalk convergence with the best throughput. This includes track based optimization earlier in the flow and the new MX global router with its significant throughput, capacity and QoR enhancements. The end goal being to ensure that runtime costly post-route optimization steps are minimized as much as possible."

Richards said Magma is working closely with all fabs to ensure it has the requisite technology in place before its customers need it. He commented: "We are already fully engaged and have significant technology solutions in place to address the new challenges at 20nm. The most obvious being the checking and routing solutions needed to meet the strict double patterning requirements needed to address the lithography challenges at this node. We will continue to work with the fabs to ensure we can keep all of our customers at the optimum point on the process node curve."

Magma's Talus Vortex FX and Talus 1.2 were unveiled on the same day. Trying to understand the reasons behind this, Richards declared: "It is very much a synergy of technologies and one where we now are able to address the ‘one-size-does-not-fit-all’ shortfall of most tools in this arena."

He added: "Remember that a Talus Vortex license will be needed for each of the partitions during implementation and as such Talus Vortex FX is primed to absorb excess license capacity that a customer may have. For customers with smaller license pool sets, or ones where the design size is significantly below the approximate 3M+ cell capacity of Talus Vortex 1.2 then there will be little or no benefit seen from distribution given the already high throughput of the base Vortex 1.2 product."

Eventually, Richards said that by having both solutions at hand massively expands the solution sets that can be trialed or employed in the process of implementing growing designs. "Talus Vortex FX also shines as a fast and early “what-if?” tool that adds to the designers’ arsenal in the all phases of SoC development," he concluded.

Magma said Talus Vortex FX is available now to a limited set of customers who said they could validate the throughput benefits on their design data in a few days.