Synopsys and Samsung foundry announce signoff flow for 3nm
A collaborate between Synopsys and Samsung Foundry has resulted in what is claimed to be the fastest design closure and signoff for process nodes down to 3nm.
The partnership includes multiple signoff domains and spans library characterisation to full-chip signoff, confirms Synopsys.
The qualified flow has significant gains in accuracy, turnaround time and designer productivity, reports the company. It targets 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) SoCs with gains claimed to enable customers at Samsung 5nm to 3nm process nodes to achieve optimal power, performance, area (PPA) and accelerate time-to-results (TTR).
Sangyun Kim, vice president of Foundry Design Technology at Samsung Electronics, commented: “Our collaboration with Synopsys has been instrumental in delivering state-of-the-art signoff flows to our customers for our advanced 5nm to 3nm process nodes.”
The Synopsys fully qualified signoff flow includes PrimeTime, which supports low voltage variation, via variation and multi-input switching with three per cent correlation to Spice, a 50 per cent reduction in overall memory footprint and a 20X performance increase for path-based analysis. It also includes StarRC, the extraction tool with a two-fold runtime improvement and accuracy within one per cent of golden reference. Other tools supported are StarRC Field Solver, for advanced node enablement, PrimeECO, which eliminates iterations between implementation and signoff, PrimePower, for fast gate level power analysis and SiliconSmart, which includes enablement on Synopsys Cloud Service, to “significantly reducing the turnaround time for library characterisation”.
“Collaborations with industry leaders in semiconductor design and manufacturing is at the core of our continued innovations in design signoff,” said Jacob Avidan, senior vice president of engineering in Synopsys’ Design Group.
Synopsys is the Silicon to Software partner for companies developing electronic products and software applications. It is the world’s 15th largest software company, with a long history in electronic design automation (EDA) and semiconductor IP and is also growing in the software security market. Customers are SoC designers and software developers writing applications that require the highest security.