Incentia releases run-tme QOR for tool line
Mike Santarini

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Incentia Design Systems Inc. has released the 2004.05 version of its timing analysis, logic synthesis and physical synthesis software products.

According to the company, the 2004.05 release improves run-time, capacity and quality of results over the previous release of Incentia's tool line, version 2003.09. The three updates are called TimeCraft, DesignCraft and DesignCraft Pro.

The latest version of Incentia's TimeCraft static timing analysis software promises a doubling of average run-time speedup over the previous version of the tool. The performance increase is attributed to a proprietary parallel look-ahead pruning algorithm for finding critical paths.

The company has also introduced analysis features that allow the tool to handle complicated clock tree structures.

The 2004.05 version Incentia's DesignCraft logic synthesis tool boasts a 3-fold run-time speedup on average compared to the previous release.

The company said run-time improvement is mainly due to Incentia's new concurrent Crest (Critical Region Extracting Synthesis Technology) algorithm that identifies multiple critical regions and performs concurrent optimizations. The Crest algorithm speeds up transformations such as worst and total negative slack optimizations, leakage power optimization, area recovery, design rule and hold time fixes and DFT optimization. The latest version of DesignCraft also includes quality of results improvements, with version 2004.05 using up to 10 percent less area and decreased total negative slack by up to 30 percent over the previous version.

Incentia's DesignCraft Pro physical synthesis engine also achieves a 3-fold run-time speedup on average by applying the concurrent Crest algorithm to its physical optimizations.

In DesignCraft Pro, the algorithm improves congestion and routability, and reduces memory usage, so the tool's capacity is increased by 15 percent, Incentia claims. The algorithm also reduces total negative slack by up to 30 percent.

DesignCraft Pro also has an enhanced area recovery algorithm that reduces area consumption by 10 percent.

A time-ased license begins at $20,000 for TimeCraft, $44,000 for DesignCraft and $100,000 for DesignCraft Pro.