Apache Design Solutions introduces RedHawk-NX

Venice, Florida — Apache Design Solutions has announced RedHawk-NX, a dynamic power integrity tool re-architected to handle designs of up to five hundred million gates. The technologies in RedHawk-NX include hierarchical dynamic power analysis, proprietary mesh pattern recognition and reuse, and multi-core support.

The release represents the third generation of RedHawk tools, starting in 2002, and offers what the company claims to be the most advanced tool for dynamic power integrity analysis. Each generation of products offers higher capacity and performance to address the latest design complexity in CPU, GPU, NPU, and devices with large memory contents.

Apache stated that RedHawk-NX supports the industry's first hierarchical dynamic technology allowing designers to adopt a bottom-up analysis methodology with various levels of abstraction. Andrew Yang, CEO of Apache explained that "When using HD's 'white-box' mode, the designers are able to maintain the same level of sign-off accuracy as RedHawk's flattened analysis. By using HD's 'gray-box' mode, designers gain additional capacity improvement."

Historically, hierarchical solutions were only available for static analysis where time-point-by-time-point waveform accuracy of the block-level simulation is not considered. With HD technology, IP providers can deliver encrypted Apache dynamic power views for use in full-chip sign-off analysis. HD also effectively supports industry's hierarchical design methodologies across multiple design sites.

Automatic mesh pattern recognition algorithm is another significant functionality new in RedHawk-NX's. It leverages regularity in the power/ground mesh structures enabling data reuse for effective reduction of physical memory needs. It handles designs with complex RDL, dense multi-layered P/G grid, and high memory content. The company claims that the technology has been demonstrated to reduce RedHawk database memory footprint by 2-3X compared with existing techniques.

RedHawk-NX was re-architected to maximize the capacity and performance advantages of the multi-core (MC) processing systems. The MC solver can be scaled to handle designs with up to billion nodes in existing computing environment. With the MC technology, designers will benefit from 2-3X runtime improvements in their dynamic transient simulation, as well as MTCMOS rush current analysis.

RedHawk-NX will be available in Q1, 2009 as a no cost upgrade to all active RedHawk-EV customers.