Cadence Design Systems, Inc. has announced the Cadence Liberate Trio Characterisation Suite, the industry’s first unified library characterisation tool that runs both statistical and nominal characterisation in parallel and provides complete validation of standard cell libraries. Employing advanced machine learning techniques, this tool uses smart interpolation to help determine the critical corners that need to be characterised. By making characterisation processes thoroughly distributed and massively parallel, it has been fully optimised for running on cloud-based servers. In addition, the Liberate Trio suite offers up to 3X performance increase by running corners in parallel and natively running statistical and nominal characterisation together.
“Characterisation is an extremely time-consuming activity with increasing corners, larger libraries, and new data formats,” said Ron Moore, vice president of business planning, Physical Design Group, Arm. “By using Arm’s Artisan Physical IP, we validated Cadence’s Liberate Trio Characterisation Suite and saw a notable improvement in turnaround time using the same number of CPUs. This is an important step in continuing to deliver high-performance libraries to our mutual customers.”
The Liberate Trio Characterisation Suite is part of the Cadence Cloud portfolio, also being announced. For more information on the new Cadence Liberate Trio Characterization Suite, please visit www.cadence.com/go/liberatetrio.
Machine learning helps predict critical corners
The machine learning algorithms in the Liberate Trio suite help guide the designer, predicting critical corners and helping designers decide what corners need to be characterised. The tool uses smart interpolation, not just linear interpolation, to ensure accuracy.
“The creation of accurate timing, power and noise models for advanced-node libraries is becoming increasingly complex,” said Vinod Kariat, corporate vice president of research and development at Cadence. “The Liberate Trio Characterisation Suite simplifies library characterisation by enabling characterisation across multiple corners and natively integrating nominal and variation in the same run. This significantly improves turnaround time and ease of use.”
Designers today have an increasing need for high-throughput characterisation and fast, accurate re-characterisation of custom corners. Cadence created a unified graphical user interface (GUI) cockpit that lets designers use a single script to efficiently launch and monitor characterisation. This addresses the challenge of maintaining consistency of data across the large number of process, voltage and temperature (PVT) corners. It also helps designers properly mine all the data that is collected.
Optimised for Cloud-based server farms
Addressing the parallel nature of library characterisation over hundreds of cells, characterisation uses multiple CPUs to improve throughput. Now, Cadence has optimised the Liberate Trio suite to be fully cloud ready, whether employed in a public or company private cloud, and scalable to over a thousand CPUs. Characterisation of a library containing over 1000 cells that would normally take weeks now can be turned around in days.
