Monday, July 17, 2006

TSMC Flow Adds Statistical STA

TSMC (Waferzilla?) has announced the latest additions to their Reference Flow, version 7.0. The two main additions are Statistical STA and more Power Management features.

Interesting that the Statistical STA flow supports vendors Magma and Synopsys. Magma has been promoting their Quartz STA tool. Has Synopsys announced a Statistical STA tool? I don't recall seeing it.

And, what about library support? How will this be done? I haven't seen any standards offered for representing variation in Liberty format, for example.

Overall, this announcement is a hopeful sign, but I wonder how real it is, or when we might actually see a working flow.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Has there any tapeouts solely on the basis of SSTA? Or has SSTA been run *after* tapeout to confirm that "hey ..it works"

The latter shows lack of confidence in the technology to handle corner cases, etc.

Anonymous said...

PrimeTime are StarRCXT are supposed to have statistical modes now. They're both from Synopsys.

Like you, I'm totally in the dark on where the library data comes from to drive these tools. There are no standards I know of.

SSTA doesn't seem to be in any optimisation tools yet. Until it is, all it really tells you is that you're timing might be okay even though your optimisation tools couldn't close it.

Anonymous said...

Sandeep,
ATI technologies has used SSTA soln for their tapeout..

Simon,
ur library characterization tool should be able to support corner/variation analysis...this is the driver for SSTA...Magma has the characterization tool and it does a very good job..