Open-Silicon Upgrades to Magma’s SiliconSmart Accelerated Circuit Engine

OpenSilicon has adopted SiliconSmart ACE from Magma Design Automation as a standard for characterization and modelling of standard and I/O cell.

Open-Silicon has been using SiliconSmart for a long time, now it has adopted the SiliconSmart ACE in order to exploit the tool’s features such as precise characterization of libraries for several processes, voltage and temperature (PVT) corners to allow increase in performance and power savings on superior-node versions.

Open-Silicon incorporates the new ACE chip specifically for new cell characterization which are formed using the CoreMAX technology. The CoreMax technology is dedicated to design-specific library augmentation flow and for library recharacterization of VariMAX technology with rear biasing.

The engineering manager at Open-Silicon, Shrikrishna Mehetre, pointed out that a number of their customers have benefited from their products that make use of the SiliconSmart. He added that the advanced features that the new ACE chip has to offer and the support provided by Magma increases their confidence in using the chip for sophisticated designs. The general manager of Magma’s Custom Design Business Unit claimed that the SiliconSmart ACE chip offered improved accuracy and speed and was easy to use. Some of the features offered by the SiliconSmart ACE are that it is compatible with noise, power, advanced timing and statistical modelling specifications. The accelerated circuit engine (ACE) ensures complete automation of the characterization flow, uses superior circuit function recognition technology, optimization algorithms and vector generation. The chip incorporates the extremely fast SPICE simulator for improving the throughput.