Sequence upgrades Columbus

SANTA CLARA: Sequence Design today announced upgrades for its Columbus parasitic extractors, aimed at high-frequency design, 65nm characterization, and analysis of simultaneous switching noise (SSN).   These new features cap a line of related improvements over the past year, including Statistically Accurate Corners for 65nm interconnect, Speedview-AMS for full-custom voltage-drop and EM analysis, and Fast Rail extraction for LVS flows. 

Columbus-AMS has modeled frequency-dependent inductance since it pioneered RLC extraction in 1999.  For designs handling 10GHz signals, it now adds frequency-dependent resistance as part of inductance modeling.  Users can still simulate efficiently, because this option does not increase network size or limit Columbus's RLC parasitic reduction.

The company claims that the Columbus family now supports Pextra Corporation's CapSe field solver and users can now build process libraries 5 times faster than previous-generation field solving, without reducing Columbus-AMS's accuracy or requiring any changes in how you use the Columbus extractors.

Columbus-AMS recently added Statistically Accurate Corners (SAC), which helps to eliminate unrealistic pessimism due to 65nm interconnect variation.  Columbus now allows users to combine SAC with temperature variations for analyzing full PVT variations. These PVT corners work with existing STAs, instead of requiring a complex transition to statistical STA tools.  Independent of SAC, Columbus-AMS can now extract up to 5 PVT combinations simultaneously. Simultaneous extraction runs 2.5 times faster than extracting 5 PVT points separately.

Speedview-AMS provides efficient graphical analysis of power rails in full-custom designs. Now supporting Columbus-Turbo for Fast Rail extraction and Columbus-AMS for signal nets, Speedview-AMS eliminates the bottlenecks in the rail-extraction flow, allowing users to concentrate on simulating and analyzing voltage-drop and electromigration in their designs.

The Columbus extraction product family is part of Sequence's high-performance, low-power design lineup:  PowerTheater, CoolPower, CoolCheck, and CoolTime.  Columbus-AMS is both a foundation for the company's RTL-to-silicon, power-aware design tools for SoCs and the industry's leading RLC parasitic extraction tool for high-performance digital and analog/mixed-signal designs.  Sequence customers have taped out over 200 successful, high-performance designs using Columbus-AMS extraction.