Magma launches Titan analog design platform

BANGALORE, INDIA: Magma Design Automation, a provider of chip design software, today announced the availability of a new release of the Titan Analog/Mixed-Signal (Titan AMS) Design Platform.

With patent-pending analog design technology, Titan provides an innovative FlexCell-to-GDSII analog/mixed-signal (AMS) flow that organically integrates both electrical design and physical design into one unified design methodology, said a press release.

This paradigm-shifting, electrical-physical co-design flow ranges from front-end design such as schematics to circuit optimization in Titan Analog Design Accelerator (Titan ADX) to back-end design such as placement and routing in Titan Analog Virtual Prototyper (Titan AVP) and Titan Shape-Based Router (Titan SBR).

This new Titan release supports Magma’s Silicon One initiative by providing faster design convergence, larger capacity and highly automated design flows that address the increasing size, complexity, and shortened development cycles, of today’s AMS designs.

Key enhancements include updates to foundry partner AMS reference flows, more efficient legacy data format support through native OpenAccess (OA) support, embedding Magma’s super-fast FineSim SPICE circuit simulation for faster and more efficient process modeling, the addition of several new advanced FlexCells that serve as process-independent analog building blocks, support of higher frequency transistor characteristics for RF design, increased capacity to simultaneously handle hundreds of multi-corner scenarios, parallel optimization through distributed implementation for faster runtime and better quality of results (QoR), and tight integration with Magma’s digital implementation tool Talus for more efficient top-level routing and chip finishing.

“As evidenced by initial successes by and Panasonic, iWatt and Exar as well as recent achievements by Fujitsu and other users, Titan is experiencing very rapid adoption for a wide variety of analog designs being manufactured in process nodes ranging from 180 to 28 nanometer and below,” said Anirudh Devgan, general manager of Magma’s Custom Design Business Unit.

He added that more than half of the top 20 semiconductor companies in the world are Titan customers and several more are actively evaluating this technology. This growth is a direct result of Titan’s advanced analog circuit design capabilities, such as non-linear constraint-based circuit optimization and high capacity and high quality analog routing that allow Titan to offer significant quality and turnaround-time advantages over traditional analog design and implementation tools.

Titan AMS Design Platform: Improving Analog/Mixed-Signal Design Productivity and Enabling Reuse. At the heart of the Titan AMS Design Platform is an advanced analog design acceleration technology that consists of Magma’s proprietary FlexCell-based circuit optimization, analog virtual prototyping, floorplanning and placement and constraint-driven shape-based routing. Complementary to this acceleration technology, Titan also provides a comprehensive AMS design environment that includes the Schematic Editor (SE), Analog Simulation Environment (ASE) with FineSim, Schematic-Driven Layout (SDL), Layout Editor (LE) and Physical Validation (PV).

Titan ADX and FlexCells - Magma’s Titan ADX and FlexCell models greatly improve productivity, accelerating the creation of new analog IP and simplifying analog IP reuse. A FlexCell represents a circuit in a mathematical, parameterized model format that includes circuit topology, functionality and physical information such as resistance and capacitance. Because they are process independent, modular and reusable, FlexCells can be easily targeted to new process technologies and optimized for different design specifications. After optimization, Titan ADX outputs a schematic with a netlist that meets the design specifications across multiple process, voltage and temperature (PVT) corners. FlexCell models include testbenches, allowing further validation of the netlist using Magma’s FineSim SPICE simulator.

Titan AVP and Titan SBR - Magma’s Titan AVP and Titan SBR take the Titan ADX optimized design (netlist) and automatically place and route it to meet design specifications and constraints. Titan AVP takes hybrid placement in area/row/stack-based requirements into consideration and supports a wide variety of constraints for pins, devices, cells and blocks to achieve optimal global placement results. Titan SBR is architecture-friendly, easily extending support for any new routing topology and constraints. Its trademark high-quality routing includes detailed RC matching, river route, differential pair with 45 degree twisted tri-bit routing, bus routing with shielding, double cut via for high reliability, and balanced-skew clock tree routing.