OIL & GAS

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced that industry-leading NanoRoute now offers super-threaded route acceleration for even faster routing. Part of the Cadence Encounter digital IC design platform, NanoRoute's new accelerated routing option provides a 10X productivity gain while maintaining excellent timing and signal integrity results. It delivers an innovative approach to near-linear performance scalability across multiple CPUs and leverages leading-edge, low-cost computer technology for a fast route to Quality-of-Silicon (QoS). Super-threading combines the advantages of multi-threaded routing with the flexibility of distributed parallel routing. It goes beyond the traditional use of 32/64-bit computer resources to consistently boost routing performance on 600K- to 400M-gate designs by up to 10X using LSF network protocols or a manually driven network. For example, a 13M-gate design took over 24 hours to route with one CPU, but finished in less than two hours with super-threading on a Linux network of seven 32-bit dual processors using all 14 CPUs simultaneously. On a 6M-gate design, super-threading completed routing in 34 minutes on a network of 20 CPUs, versus over seven hours on a single CPU. "NanoRoute has led the industry in terms of speed and capacity since its inception. It is one of the many reasons why we chose to standardize on NanoRoute for our 130- and 90-nanometer designs," said Jim Wang, director of the Design Development Division at Faraday. "So far we are seeing as much as 10X runtime improvements on our network compared to single CPU route operations, without any special hardware. Super-threading takes NanoRoute performance to a whole new level and will clearly reduce our design cycles significantly without sacrificing quality." "AMD produces the world's leading 32- and 64-bit microprocessor architecture with the AMD Opteron(TM) processor and we demand the highest performance, predictability and quality of design tools to achieve this result," said Ben Williams, director of AMD's Server/Workstation Business Segment. "With super-threading we can now use the full power of NanoRoute across our AMD Opteron processor-based Linux farm. The high-performance combination of AMD Opteron and NanoRoute allows us to take routing out of the critical path of our design cycle for any size block." "The electronics design community is deploying Linux-based 32/64 bit platforms to take advantage of their compelling cost and performance benefits," said Chris Esemplare, vice president, IBM Global Electronics Industry. "IBM is committed to helping customers realize the value of this new paradigm in high-performance computing and strongly supports the EDA community in its migration to Linux. Cadence's NanoRoute super-threading running on a Linux cluster resolves the shortcomings of traditional distributed routing applications, such as load-balancing issues and poor scalability, while maximizing the cost and performance benefits for our customers." "The innovative approach we took to develop super threading addresses the move to more affordable Linux-based hardware because we saw that existing distributed methodologies were not scalable," said Wei-Jin Dai, vice president of the Cadence Encounter digital IC design platform. "The response from our customers is confirmation that we have delivered faster, more scaleable routing." Super-threading is available with NanoRoute in Encounter version SoC 4.1.