Synopsys PrimeTime

Overview
Signoff users generally have four key solution requirements in order to meet their design requirement needs:
continuous improvement to runtime and capacity to address increasing chip size requirements, efficient multi-scenario analysis to verify timing across all corners and modes, margin control to reduce over-design and maximize chip performance, and accuracy to insure correlation to silicon. The Synopsys PrimeTime® Suite addresses these requirements by delivering fast, memory-efficient scalar and multicore computing, distributed multi-scenario analysis and ECO fixing, using advanced constraint analysis, and variationaware Composite Current Source (CCS) modeling that extends static timing analysis to include Crosstalk Timing, Noise, Power and statistical STA.

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PrimeTime Suite
The Synopsys PrimeTime suite, including PrimeTime, PrimeTime SI, PrimeTime PX and PrimeTime VX, provides a single, golden, trusted signoff solution for timing, signal integrity, power and variation-aware analysis. It delivers HSPICE® accurate signoff analysis that helps pinpoint problems prior to tapeout thereby reducing risk, ensuring design integrity, and lowering the cost of design.
This industry gold-standard improves your team's productivity by delivering fast turnaround to shave precious time from development schedules for large and small designs while ensuring first-pass silicon success through greater predictability and the highest accuracy.

Benefits

HSPICE-Accurate Results Minimize Over-Design
HSPICE-accurate analysis pinpoints timing problems quickly and reduces ECO fixing time. Use of CCS models provides consistent results for static timing, signal integrity, power, and variation-aware analysis. Path-based analysis is available to zero-in on your most challenging timing paths. Advanced on-chip variation modeling and variation-aware analysis deliver additional margin control. This helps designers avoid the over- and under-design of chips reducing overall costs and shaving valuable time from design schedules.

Figure 1: Galaxy signoff solutions
Figure 1. Galaxy signoff solutions

Integrated Design Environment Improves Productivity
The unified analysis environment in the PrimeTime Suite enables designers to perform complete timing, signal integrity, power and variation-aware analysis in a single environment which improves designer productivity, reduces set-up steps, as well as minimizes the number of interface files created and used. This leads to faster time-to-results because identical operations, such as timing and slew calculations, are not repeated. Costs are minimized by eliminating the need for multiple products with associated support costs.

Fast Turn-around Time Speeds Analysis and Signoff
PrimeTime offers a range of solutions to reduce time required for analysis and signoff. Distributed Multi-Scenario Analysis (DMSA) enables multiple scenarios to be run concurrently which reduces wall clock time and produces a single comprehensive timing report. Coupled with features such as automated setup, hold and DRC-fixing that reduce ECO time from days to minutes, this capability reduces timing closure turn-around time and improves engineering productivity. New multicore support further reduces the time required for static timing and signal integrity analysis.

High Capacity Approach Reduces Hardware Costs
PrimeTime uses intelligent disk-caching for reduced memory footprints and multi-threading for faster performance.

Complete Solution Ensures Comprehensive Signoff
Comprehensive timing and design rule checking, extensive design constraint annotation and delay reporting allow ASIC and COT designers to signoff with confidence knowing that all aspects of their designs have been analyzed.

20nm support
New for the 2012.06 release is the support for 20nm Double-Patterning Technology (DPT). PrimeTime can now consume multi-valued SPEF parasitics extracted from designs created with DPT.

PrimeTime
The Synopsys PrimeTime static timing analysis solution is the most trusted and advanced timing signoff solution for gate-level designs. It is the industry's de-facto gold standard for gate-level static timing analysis with the capacity and performance for 500+ million instance chips being designed at 28-nm and below. PrimeTime static timing analysis and StarRC™ parasitic extraction are industry gold standards, and key components of the Galaxy™ Design Platform.

The PrimeTime STA solution provides a comprehensive and unmatched environment for timing signoff and timing analysis. It provides to designers extensive timing analysis checks, advanced on-chip variation analysis techniques, golden delay calculation, advanced modeling, unmatched productivity and ease-of-use, a graphical user interface, and industry-wide ASIC vendor signoff and foundry support.

The PrimeTime static timing analysis solution provides the foundation and environment for a suite of extensions in signoff analysis. In addition to timing analysis, PrimeTime SI, PrimeTime PX, and PrimeTime VX deliver extensions for signal integrity analysis, leakage and dynamic power analysis, and variationaware analysis.

Comprehensive Timing Analysis
PrimeTime has an unparalleled number of timing analysis capabilities to enable signoff of the most complex designs. The comprehensive set of timing and design rule checks combined with extensive design constraint annotation and delay reporting, allow designers to peer into all aspects of their designs, and confidently analyze and signoff their design.

Figure 2: Standard PrimeTime flow

Golden Delay Calculator
PrimeTime's built-in RC delay calculator uses parasitic information and Composite Current Source (CCS) libraries to calculate cell and interconnect delays with SPICElike accuracy. The extensive delay calculation and parasitic annotation reporting capabilities enable designers to easily debug and pinpoint problems thereby improving productivity. The advanced delay calculator supports voltage and temperature scaling between libraries. This enables multivoltage analysis and eliminates the need to maintain a large collection of libraries for each unique process-voltagetemperature (PVT) point.

Advanced On-Chip Variation (AOCV) Analysis
At 65-nm and below, the traditional approach of using a global derate margin to account for on-chip variations (OCV) can add excessive margins and result in over-design, reduced design performance, and longer design cycles.
PrimeTime's advanced on-chip variation (Advanced OCV) modeling capability extends OCV analysis to deliver an improved method of adding margin in a design. Advanced OCV uses context-specific derate factors that consider location and logic depth of each path being analyzed. As a result, excessive design margins are reduced and fewer timing violations are seen. The pessimism-reducing approach of Advanced OCV reduces over-design and enables designers to reach timing closure quicker and with greater confidence.

Distributed Multi-Scenario Analysis (DMSA)
The greater design functionality and complexity afforded by today's smaller geometries combined with accompanying physical phenomena has led to an explosion in the number of scenarios which need to be verified.
Verification of a chip design requires analysis of many individual scenarios that represent different operational modes and voltage, temperature and process corners.
Analyzing and managing the analysis of these scenarios is simplified with PrimeTime's Distributed Multi-Scenario Analysis (DMSA) capability. DMSA allows designers to set up, distribute, run, and perform ECO fixing simultaneously across multiple scenarios, thereby reducing overall turnaround time.

Additional Features in PrimeTime

PrimeTime SI
With shrinking process geometries and rising clock frequencies for nanometer designs, signal integrity (SI) effects such as crosstalk delay and noise (or glitch) propagation can cause functional failures or failed timing. It is essential for designers to address these SI problems to ensure that their designs are delivered to market correctly in the shortest amount of time. Time-to-market pressure, chip complexity, and control of SI effects are all factors requiring an accurate, fast, and trusted analysis and signoff solution.

The PrimeTime SI solution extends the trusted, tape-out proven PrimeTime static timing analysis and signoff environment by adding accurate crosstalk delay, noise (glitch), and voltage (IR) drop delay analysis to address signal integrity effects at 90-nm and below.

Ease-of-Adoption and Use
PrimeTime SI, an extension of PrimeTime Static Timing Analysis (STA), is easy-to-use and adopt. It utilizes the familiar PrimeTime flow and environment, with common commands, user interface, reports, and attributes. (See figure 3)

Figure 3: PrimeTime SI flow — Easy to use and adopt

Comprehensive SI Analysis Built into the PrimeTime Environment
The unified approach of signal integrity and timing analysis delivers a comprehensive and time-efficient method to concurrently analyze noise and crosstalk delay effects on timing.
Additionally, the concurrent analysis in a single tool enables faster results while improving designer productivity.

Accurate Crosstalk Delay, Noise (glitch) and IR Drop Analysis
Signal integrity effects are interdependent and need to be analyzed in the context of timing. PrimeTime SI uses an integrated golden delay calculation engine with the proven and trusted PrimeTime static timing analysis engine to accurately model and compute timing deviations due to crosstalk and IR drop. PrimeTime SI has the capacity and performance required to perform accurate noise calculation, detection, and propagation on the largest of today's designs. (See figure 4)

Figure 4: Crosstalk delay analysis pinpoints crosstalk timing failures.

Fast Multi-Scenario ECO Guidance
PrimeTime’s signoff-accurate ECO guidance enables a faster more predictable ECO closure flow, offering high fix rates - often in a single iteration. Optimum fixes for both timing and DRC violations are identified using the unique composite view available in the PrimeTime multi-scenario timing environment, avoiding the iterative bottleneck analysis normally associated with multi-scenario ECOs. PrimeTime’s integrated ECO solution offers timing-aware DRC fixing for maximum capacitance, transition and fanout, and timing fixes that honor DRC. ECO guidance is resource efficient, working either on a single box or a distributed compute farm. In the event that limited hardware resources are available, analysis can be completed where the number of scenarios is less than the number of available hosts.

Additional Features in PrimeTime SI

PrimeTime VX
The PrimeTime VX solution extends the PrimeTime environment to analyze device and interconnect variations using statistical techniques. Variation-aware analysis with the PrimeTime VX solution delivers improved margin control, avoiding the over- and under- design of circuits. Design robustness can be improved by pinpointing areas of the chip most susceptible to variations so that designers can reduce this sensitivity and improve the parametric yield of production chips. PrimeTime VX analyzes systematic or deterministic process variation (die-to-die) as well as random process variation (on-die) in a flexible environment with a large range of features that can be introduced into existing design flows.
PrimeTime VX allows users to leverage their existing investment in their trusted PrimeTime STA tool infrastructure, flow and knowledge.

High Accuracy, Sample-Based Statistical Timing Analysis
PrimeTime VX employs a unique approach to statistical timing analysis that delivers very high accuracy. The PrimeTime VX statistical engine is a Monte Carlo style sample-based engine that delivers signoff accuracy.

This approach ensures that all process parameters, regardless of their distributions and cross-correlations can be accurately modeled in the analysis. Using this approach, PrimeTime VX is liberated from the complex statistical mathematical challenges which are often used by other tools and that can often impact accuracy.

Comprehensive, Full Chip Statistical Analysis Solution
PrimeTime VX delivers full-chip performance and capacity with the comprehensive set of capabilities necessary for signoff. PrimeTime VX adds statistical timing analysis to graph-based and path-based analysis while retaining key capabilities such as Signal Integrity (SI) analysis, clock re-convergence pessimism removal (CRPR), what-if-analysis, bottleneck analysis, IR Drop annotation and distributed multi-scenario analysis (DMSA).

Strong Ecosystem
PrimeTime VX is a part of a complete variation-aware analysis solution provided by Synopsys that includes StarRC VX for statistical RC extraction and Liberty™ NCX for statistical library characterization and quality assurance. Along with our top rated world-wide applications support personnel, trusted library vendor IP, and foundry qualification and reference flows from leading foundries including TSMC and STARC, we have put together a strong ecosystem to ensure design success.

Additional Features in PrimeTime VX

PrimeTime PX
The PrimeTime PX solution expands the PrimeTime timing and signal integrity environment to deliver highly accurate dynamic and leakage power analysis for design geometries at 90-nm and below. Designers have a single, unified analysis environment for timing, signal integrity and power analysis that is anchored by the golden PrimeTime static timing solution and delivers the highest productivity and a predictable path to silicon for their most complex designs.

By combining timing, signal integrity and power analysis into a single tool and environment, common operations are not repeated. For example, netlist, parasitic and constraint file reads, and tool setup steps are not repeated.
As a result, the PrimeTime PX solution delivers up to two times (2x) faster time-to-results (TTR) over separate, standalone solutions. As an integral part of the PrimeTime environment, power analysis can be performed using common PrimeTime commands, reports, attributes and debugging features. (See figure 5)

Figure 5: PrimeTime PX flow.

Full-Chip Timing, SI and Power Analysis
The unified analysis environment enables designers to perform accurate leakage and dynamic power analysis along with timing and SI analysis.

Power and timing analysis are integrated in a single tool, which improves designer productivity by providing results faster with fewer set-up steps. Designers can understand the trade-offs and effects of leakage and dynamic power in the context of complete timing, signal integrity and power analysis by adopting the new easy-to-use methodology from PrimeTime PX.

Vector-Free Dynamic Power Analysis
Vector-free dynamic power analysis allows power analysis to be performed without waiting for switching data from simulation. By using the PrimeTime tool's accurate timing windows, vectorfree analysis enables power analysis early in the design flow to identify blocks with the highest power consumption sooner.

Statistical Leakage Power Analysis
Statistical leakage power analysis in PrimeTime PX extends PrimeTime suite's statistical technology to leakage variation analysis for advanced designs at 65-nm and below. Variation-aware leakage power analysis in PrimeTime PX reduces the leakage signoff pessimism associated with using multiple process corner libraries. An intuitive, easy-touse graphical user interface enables designers to make efficient yield versus leakage tradeoff decisions for their most complex power-sensitive designs.

Additional Features in PrimeTime PX

Galaxy Signoff Modeling and Platform Support
Advanced Modeling
The PrimeTime Suite provides a wide range of advanced modeling support. Interface Logic Models (ILM) are provided for hierarchical static timing analysis and signoff. Extracted Timing Models (ETM) are provided, in .lib format, for cell-based reusable IP and physical design flows. Quick Timing Models (QTM) are available for top-down design.
A complete set of validaton, debugging and model merging features are also provided. HyperScale hierarchical analysis technology uses a model-less approach to hierarchical analysis and signoff, using the information captured in saved sessions to replace block models.

Platform Support
The following platforms are supported: AMD64, Sparc64, Linux32 4.0, SUSE 32 and SUSE 64

About Galaxy Design Platform
The Galaxy Design Platform is an open, integrated design implementation platform with best-in-class tools and IP, enabling advanced semiconductor design. Anchored by Synopsys' industry-leading semiconductor design tools and the open Milkyway™ database, the Galaxy Design Platform incorporates consistent timing, SI analysis, common libraries, delay calculation, constraints, testability and physical verification to provide a convergent flow from RTL all the way to silicon. The Galaxy Design Platform helps reduce design time, decrease integration costs and minimize the risks inherent in advance, complex semiconductor design.