NEW ORLEANS - Both Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys, which just completed its purchase of Avanti, plan to offer parallel processing for chip routing at the 90 nanometer node. Representatives of both companies said at the Design Automation Conference here that they are rolling out support into their place-and-route tools for techniques to split the intense routing workload across multiple processors and machines.
Cadence is working to combine technologies developed in-house and acquired over the past two years with a 90-nm toolset to be launched by the end of this year. Shortly before the completion of the acquisition by Synopsys, Avanti said it had added support for distributed routing to its Astro place-and-route tool.
Cadence will incorporate the router developed by Plato Design Systems fully into the 90-nm toolset, with additional support to avoid signal-integrity problems rolled in from the existing Wroute engine and elsewhere. Today, Nanoroute, which incorporated support for parallel processing last year, is available as an option for the 130-nm flow.
"Plato [Nanoroute] is not intended to replace anything," said Lavi Lev, general manager of Cadence's IC solutions business unit. "It is a blazingly fast router and we are working to integrate that with the maturity of Wroute. That is being done right now and it is a very easy integration process. It will be launched by the end of this year as part of our 90-nm solution integrated with Wroute."
"Plato has signal integrity capability, but we are using world-class capabilities bought in with Cadmos," Lev said. "It will take a month or two to complete that. There is some more work to do, but not a lot."
The distributed routing addition to Astro comes on top of an updated physical-effects analysis engine that Synopsys calls "table lookup plus". The additions to the table-lookup engine looks at effects such as copper dishing, caused by the chemical-mechanical polishing needed for copper processes, as well as air gaps and etching differences caused by changes in metal spacing and width.
Noel Strader, formerly of Avanti and now a member of Synopsys' marketing department, said the distributed routing engine is optional but that "distributed routing is so powerful that people will demand it. The facility doesn't come for free but many companies have global licences for these tools and they will make use of those."
The approach taken by Avant is not to parallelize the initial process of generating the routes for the various wires that populate a chip. Instead, one processor handles that work. The parallel processors are used to ease the more time-consuming operation of fixing up the design-rule violations.
