Friday, June 03, 2005

IBM markets statistical timing analyzer

EETimes.com - IBM markets statistical timing analyzer announces IBM's (re-)entry into the commercial EDA market. "Statistical STA" is new and hot. It should allow for less pessimistic STA, which becomes a critical requirement around 65nm. If you guardband to assume that every parameter is 3-sigma worst case, that's an unrealistic situation. A Statistical STA tool would understand that what combination of variations would happen with 3-sigma probability. Magma plans to launch a tool, but I haven't seen Synopsys or Cadence announce anything. Another type of variation is "location-based correlation". I don't see that addressed by the IBM STA tool.

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