Tuesday May 6, 2008, PT

Incentia Introduces ECOCraft-Power for Leakage Power Reduction

Additional 20% Leakage Power Reduction from Already Optimized Designs,
10X Turnaround Time Improvement

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - May 6, 2008 - Incentia Design Systems, Inc., a technology leader in timing analysis and design closure solutions, today announced the addition of ECOCraft-Power to its ECOCraft product suite. ECOCraft-Power is used for leakage power reduction at the post layout stage of the design process. It is integrated with TimeCraft? the world fastest static timing analyzer (STA). Having the timing analysis and ECO integrated in one tool provides maximum leakage power reduction, optimum performance, and results in increased productivity.

Traditionally, leakage power optimization is performed at the P&R stage of the design process. A P&R tool needs to consider timing, die size, power, routability and signal integrity, and thus has many objectives to achieve at the same time. ECOCraft-Power, on the other hand, is a stand alone ECO tool focusing on leakage power only to achieve the best quality of results. Up to 20% leakage power can be further reduced from already optimized designs after P&R, or up to 60% leakage power can be reduced from designs without leakage power optimization, while keeping setup times intact.

Most stand alone ECO tools provide the ECO function without a built-in timing engine. They rely heavily on interfaces to and from a third party static timing analysis tool. Inefficiency is unavoidable, due to the communications between files with large amounts of data. Since ECOCraft integrates the TimeCraft timing engine, the ECO and timing analysis are done in one tool. A 10x runtime improvement can be easily achieved.

"ECOCraft has been used at various customer sites and has successfully taped out designs over 20 million gates," said Arthur Wei, Vice President of Operations at Incentia. "Leakage power reduction also helps improve timing closure. Customers who used ECOCraft-Power to reduce leakage power, often observed a reduction of hold time violations as well. Therefore, they could achieve faster closure in the subsequent hold time fixing process."

ECOCraft Incentia's ECOCraft product suite contains two major components. ECOCraft-Power is used to reduce leakage power, and ECOCraft-Timing is used to fix hold time violations.

ECOCraft-Power (PECO)
ECOCraft-Power is a post layout in-place leakage power reduction tool. It utilizes multi-threshold libraries and can further reduce 10% to 20% leakage power from already optimized designs or up to 60% leakage power from designs without leakage power optimization. Setup times are preserved through the use of a highly accurate delay estimation algorithm. Since it uses the in-place optimization technique, ECOCraft-Power replaces low-threshold cells with their high-threshold counterparts with the same layout footprints on the spots. There is no need to re-do the time consuming place and route. Dynamic power is also reduced at the same time because low-threshold cells consume less internal power. In general, ECOCraft-Power runs 5X to 10X faster than other existing solutions due to its built-in TimeCraft timing engine. Multi-Mode Multi-Corner (MMMC) flow is also supported to reduce total turnaround time..

ECOCraft-Timing (TECO)
ECOCraft-Timing is a post layout hold time optimization tool. Once your design is free of setup time violations, it tries to fix hold time violations under MMMC simultaneously, without violating setup times. It adopts an innovative algorithm that fixes the largest amount of hold time violations with a minimal number of delay insertions. The impact to layout is therefore minimized. Due to the tightly integrated ECO and TimeCraft timing engine, runtimes are 8X to 10X faster than other existing solutions. To further reduce total turnaround time, all the corresponding MMMC processes can be distributed to network machines and run in parallel.

Price and Availability
The ECOCraft release is available now for Sun Solaris (32-bit and 64-bit) and Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) platforms. For pricing and availability information, please contact Incentia at info@incentia.com.

About Incentia
Incentia Design Systems, Inc. is a leading Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tool provider of advanced Timing Analysis, Design Closure, and Logic Synthesis software for multi-million-gate nanometer designs. Incentia patented technologies provide the fastest Static Timing Analysis (STA) tool in the market today. Incentia's products are in use at leading semiconductor, fabless IC design, systems, and design service companies worldwide and have produced numerous successful tape-outs in different design application areas, such as communications, networking, wireless, chip-sets, consumer electronics, and multi-media. Incentia has offices in Santa Clara, California and Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan, and distributors in Japan, India, China, Korea, and Israel. For more information, please visit www.incentia.com, email to Email Contact or call 408-727-8988..

Press Contact:
Arthur Wei
Incentia Design Systems, Inc.
+1 408-727-8988 X120
Email Contact

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