Synopsys tackles the ECO challenges with PrimeClosure

Thanks to real-time integration with the physical design flow and to new optimization algorithms, the solution promises dramatic TAT improvements and significant PPA benefits for large SoCs and multi-die designs – running on single box hardware

Major EDA vendors are launching new products to address the challenges of design closure and ECOs in deep-submicron SoCs. On October 5^th Synopsys introduced its new PrimeClosure solution. Jacob Avidan, senior vice president of Engineering for the Silicon Realization Group at Synopsys, described the features of PrimeClosure in the video interview he recently gave to EDACafe’s Sanjay Gangal. Building on that interview, in this article we will add some more details about the new solution by means of the answers that Manoj Chacko, Director of Product Marketing for Synopsys PrimeClosure, provided to our additional questions.

ECO challenges at advanced nodes

Avidan started out by recalling the causes and consequences the ECO challenges: “Semiconductor companies are under tremendous time-to-market pressure struggling to meet power, performance, and area requirements which are far more aggressive than previous product generations,” he said. “EDA is playing a big role in enabling these innovations by delivering significant PPA and productivity improvements in an era where the gains from just Moore’s Law scaling are not enough to meet customer’s ambitions. Design closure as known as ECO is one of the key areas where significant innovation is needed to converge designs with dramatically fewer iterations and PPA improvements. Several customers tell us that ECO has become a major bottleneck in overall cycle time and sometime contributes up to 50% of overall design cycle.”

Chacko recently elaborated on the causes of this problem in an article. One key factor is that advanced nodes – 7 nanometers, 5 nanometers, 3 nanometers – require additional types of analysis, due to the physical effects of finer geometries. Timing is still the key metric, but both dynamic and leakage power are also extremely important today. Dynamic and static IR (voltage) drop analysis has become critical due to IR effects on timing. Other important checks now include the clocking network, metal layers, area, route congestion, reliability, robustness, and ability to handle process variations. All these optimizations are typically run sequentially, and ECO tools provide varying levels of support for improving the results. According to Chacko, a traditional ECO solution designed for optimization of timing closure may run very inefficiently when used for area and timing closure, or not handle these dimensions of optimization at all. Additionally, dozens or even hundreds of corners or scenarios must be considered. The result of all this analysis is that millions of violations are reported on early physical implementation runs.

Credit: Synopsys

Synopsys’ answer: PrimeClosure

PrimeClosure builds on three Synopsys’ preexisting ECO signoff products: PrimeTime ECO, PrimeECO, and Tweaker ECO. As Chacko clarified, “PrimeClosure replaces all the existing ECO products from Synopsys. PrimeClosure is a new product. Synopsys has rich lineage of the market leading ECO solutions and we have infused technologies from them.”

Avidan summarized the goals and benefits of this product unification: “Synopsys PrimeClosure – he said – enables the fastest design closure in the industry.  With the deep integration in Fusion Compiler and PrimeTime we can ensure 100% golden signoff accurate quality of results and rapid design objective convergence. We also infused our AI technology within ECO to significantly improve the quality of ECOs from a PPA and convergence perspective. This is a big leap forward for the industry and we are excited about enabling our customers accelerate their design closure cycles with this approach.”

Credit: Synopsys

Synopsys’ recipe

Different EDA vendors are addressing the ECO challenges in different ways, also depending on their respective preexisting solutions. As for Synopsys, key ingredients of the PrimeClosure recipe are “live” (real time) integration with the entire physical design flow (place & route and signoff), the addition of new optimization algorithms, and a secret sauce that includes artificial intelligence.

“PrimeClosure is signoff accurate with native integration of PrimeTime, PrimePower and StarRC. It is fully integrated with our implementation market leading product Fusion Compiler that offers advanced legalizer and routing technologies,” Avidan explained.

“Customers get PrimeTime accurate optimization in PrimeClosure,” Chacko pointed out. “Some of the capabilities are our trade secrets and we don’t want to publicize them,” he added.

New optimization algorithms also play a key role. “PrimeClosure offers advanced technologies in the area of power recovery, clock optimization – Avidan pointed out – and has unique wiring technology for high performance design providing further PPA benefits and estimating the impact of wire changes to help minimize any surprises when implementing ECO changes in P&R system. New physical co-optimizations of the design across placement, wiring, congested routes, and smart buffering minimizes ECO count, and reduces the number of design cycle loops, to deliver the best convergent flow for customers.”

“PrimeClosure has many unique capabilities that contribute to its large capacity and rapid TAT,” Avidan added. “It can process ‘dirty’ designs with many violations efficiently and quickly, making it suitable for running as soon as preliminary layouts are available. Finally we developed AI technology across the entire ECO solution space to further boost PPA.”

Integration with PrimeShield

Let’s take a quick look at the capabilities enabled by the integration of PrimeClosure with the Synopsys physical design flow. The integration with PrimeShield robustness analysis aims at improving closure for robustness, voltage, parasitic variation, aging analysis, and at improving overall design PPA-RA (Power, Performance, Area, Robustness, Aging).

“As technology nodes progress, device aging effects, process variability, and reliability analysis are also key areas which are rapidly expanding and impact PPA and silicon quality. We offer customers comprehensive analysis and PrimeTime accurate ECO via the integration of PrimeClosure with PrimeShield,” Avidan confirmed.

Credit: Synopsys

Integration with Ansys RedHawk-SC

Ansys RedHawk-SC has been integrated long ago with Synopsys’ Fusion Compiler and PrimeTime. Now the integration with PrimeClosure enables new capabilities, as Avidan explained: “This enables the industry’s first automated late-stage golden timing-aware IR-ECO. The flow can fix up to 90% late-stage dynamic voltage drop violations and maximize energy efficiency without impacting chip timing.”

Chacko added that this new ‘live’ (real time) integration was prototyped with Tweaker and ran many successful trials at many leading companies. The resulting effect is removing the perception that is too late in the flow to repair dynamic IR without hurting timing.

Credit: Synopsys

PrimeClosure has also been integrated with Synopsys’ Formality ECO solution, “to deliver functional ECO generation and implementation through post-mask last-mile timing ECO signoff closure,” Avidan said.

Single box architecture

Another key PrimeClosure benefit that Synopsys is claiming is the combination of high capacity and limited hardware requirements: “PrimeClosure brings the industry’s best high-capacity, single-box architecture handling large SoC designs in the fastest turnaround time,” Avidan maintained. “We are already seeing more and more of our customers adopting multi-die design implementations,” he continued. “With PrimeClosure, we are well positioned to address multi-die requirements for performance and capacity, that address tomorrow’s designs with thousands of corners and hundreds of blocks within a single box.”

One of the ways PrimeClosure achieves workload reduction is by ‘pruning’ scenarios. A technology dubbed Smart Pruner takes inputs from the user and then does scenario or hierarchy reduction for processing.

The single box architecture has been tested and has achieved significant results: according to Synopsys, PrimeClosure can complete a design with billions of instances using only 28 cores. “This is a unique strength Synopsys has in PrimeClosure. There is work published on this at SNUG,” Chacko said. “PrimeClosure has unique technologies which enable it to optimize large designs on a single box machine. For the extremely large designs, PrimeClosure Gigachip hierarchical technology leverages parallel processing but in a unique way to scale the job to a few machines, four or five,” he added.

The graphical user interface

According to Synopsys, one of the benefits offered by PrimeClosure is the ‘physical awareness’ that helps users to optimize parasitic and timing. Analyzing and applying physical information during optimization, users can reduce the ECO iterations count. This is performed in a manual ECO mode from a single cockpit that lets users see the input physical layout to choose optimal ECO cell locations, understand the reason for unfixable violations, edit on the fly and interactively verify the results. The cockpit provides a new graphical user interface for design visualization for final touch-ups, including an open database interface available to custom scripts for user-driven optimization.

Credit: Synopsys

Early users’ results

The PrimeClosure announcement press release includes an endorsement from Socionext, that with the new solution has reduced its turnaround time by over 5x, used 3x less machine memory and required 5x fewer machine resources. Other early users have achieved impressive results, according to Synopsys: “We had strong demand for early access of PrimeClosure technology and the results from our top partners have been very encouraging,” Avidan said. “On the TAT front, we see up to 10X faster TAT, 3X memory reduction, and reduce hardware resources up to 10X. We also see great PPA benefits, with new power ECO algorithm we see up to 10% better power recovery using over 4X fewer operations, reducing power ECO turnaround time by over 3X. We developed a new approach to clock ECO which improves timing fixing by up to 25%. On a key metrics which is number of iterations we see up to 50% cut in ECO iterations, and up to 10X higher design productivity. Overall we see time-to-results are achieved in hours instead of weeks.”

Credit: Synopsys

Credit: Synopsys

The competitive landscape

With multiple major EDA vendors launching signoff and ECO solutions these days, it’s interesting to take a look at the competitive landscape. Clearly, Synopsys claims a leadership in this area: “Synopsys is the market leader in ECO,” Chacko maintained. “We have always been miles ahead from the competition in technology, and PrimeClosure has truly leapfrogged the competition. The capabilities that the competition just announced are not new to our customers, Synopsys ECO solutions have had them for several years. We like a strong competition as it keeps up paranoid and helps us push ourselves harder to bring new innovations to the market.”

PrimeClosure can also be used in combination with place-and-route tools from other EDA vendors, just as its predecessors: “PT-ECO and Tweaker ECO have been in the market for a long time, approximately twenty years, and worked with the P&R tools available. We will continue the same support,” Chacko confirmed. Clearly, native integration with other tools is only applicable to Synopsys flows.

Additional resources on PrimeClosure include an article by Manoj Chacko, two videos featuring Jacob Avidan and Shankar Krishnamoorthy (accessible from this page), and a video with Manoj Chacko.

Categories: EDACafe Editorial, Video Interview

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