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Product Briefing Outline: Blaze DFM, has announced the Release 1.1 update to ‘Blaze MO' optimization software, the company's "Electrical DFM" solution. In electrical DFM, "design requirements" explicitly refers to timing and power (electrical) requirements, not just geometric information. Bringing design requirements forward into manufacturing means using the actual timing and power constraints supplied by the design team to drive what happens in manufacturing. Typically, this is done by interfacing with the resolution enhancement technology (RET) process in manufacturing.

Problem: Electrical DFM solutions eclipse the "shape-centric" DFM tools from other vendors, according to the company by providing significant gains in parametric yield, reduced power, and improved performance for sub-100nm process technologies. Unlike earlier DFM approaches, which are geometric in nature, electrical DFM uses design intent information (such as timing constraints) to drive a manufacturing-aware optimization of the design.

Solution: Blaze MO performs a comprehensive power and timing optimization of a finished design just prior to the handoff to manufacturing. No changes to any of the design layers are made during this optimization. Instead, Blaze MO outputs an annotation layer in the handoff GDSII database that gives detailed guidance to the OPC flow used in manufacturing. Blaze MO annotations in the design are used in manufacturing to guide the OPC process to a solution that is optimized to meet power and timing constraints. In contrast to the design-oblivious OPC flow that has been used in the past, with Blaze MO every physical feature is fabricated in the way that best supports the design objectives.
 From internal benchmarks performed on customer designs, the company claims that Release 1.1 is up to five times (5X) faster than the previous version. Blaze MO release 1.1 includes advances to every major function of the software. It offers patent-pending auto-correlation to existing golden timing and signal integrity signoff tools, which substantially improves the ease of incorporating the software into the customer design environment. The strengthened signal integrity analyses further improve leakage optimization quality of results by reducing the need for guardbanding in the design team's optimization methodology. The analysis engines have been enhanced to account for leakage variation caused by both systematic and random sources. The optimization engine was enhanced to support process-window awareness when choosing among available variants. Lastly, the annotation flow was extended to support manufacturability awareness in the generation of OPC directives.

Applications: IC designs at the 90nm node and below.

Platform: Blaze MO is built on the Open Access database. It integrates easily into existing design flows from Cadence, Synopsys and Magma using industry standard file formats, including SDC, Liberty, Verilog, LEF/DEF, DSPF/SPEF, and GDSII. Blaze MO annotated GDSII output can be used to drive any commercial OPC tool. Blaze MO Release 1.1 is available on all supported hardware platforms as a free upgrade for customers under current maintenance agreements.

Availability: July 2006 onwards.