Axell Reduces Power, Increases Productivity With Sequence's PowerTheater.

Cites "Very Precise" RTL Power Analysis, Ease Of Use

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Axell Corporation, an emerging Japanese multimedia chip supplier, has selected Sequence Design's PowerTheater for precision power calculations at RTL, routinely reducing power consumption by as much as 20 percent according to Kazunori Matsuura, Engineering Group Director, Axell Corporation. Axell recently taped out a complex graphic chip comprising multi-million gate devices with PowerTheater.

"With a very precise measurement of power at RTL we could determine power budgets and make packaging decisions early in the design cycle which reduces costs significantly," Matsuura said. "In addition to its outstanding accuracy at RT level, PowerTheater was also quite easy to use. Designers could visualize and resolve power-related problems quickly."

"We have been working closely with leading semiconductor vendors in Japan for several years to provide them with Design for Power (DFP) solutions," said Tom Miller, Sequence Design Vice President and Head of R&D, Front-End Products. "We have now expanded our strategy to work with emerging, innovative companies like Axell who are concerned about power. We were impressed by Axell's engineering team which was able to quickly bring up PowerTheater and accelerate their time to market while achieving significant power savings in their complex designs."

About PowerTheater/PowerTheater-Explorer

PowerTheater is the industry's first RTL power analysis and management solution with the singular ability to accurately estimate and reduce power at RTL and support power management techniques such as voltage islands, mixed voltage threshold, power gating, and clock gating. PowerTheater recently added support for the Si2 CPF standard along with the following new features:

* Control all aspects of running PowerTheater through a single Tcl-based command file.

* Identify high power windows utilizing comprehensive simulations from hardware accelerators.

* Compute full-chip, gate-level power efficiently using RTL simulations.

* Prevent voltage-drop related test and functional failures by automatically identifying critical vectors from multiple simulations.

PowerTheater-Explorer is an innovative option that adds state-of-the art power visualization and debug capabilities for fast, interactive power reduction. A new SmartSource Viewer allows designers to determine hot spots in the design, to visualize, debug and interactively determine ways to reduce a design's power. The hierarchical RTL power tree display shows hot spots that can be cross-probed to schematics, showing connectivity and indicating how activity is moving through the design and how instances impact one another. These results can be displayed and analyzed at RTL, gate, or mixed levels of abstraction. SmartSource also provides a dedicated view of the clock tree for fast isolation and optimization.

For more information, visit: www.sequencedesign.com/solutions/powertheater.php.

About Axell Corporation

As an R&D fabless semiconductor manufacturer, Axell focuses its management resources on research and development operations for LSI and compression/ decompression technologies related to graphics and sound. The purpose of our R&D operations is to develop advanced and highly practical technologies such as LSIs that enable high-resolution graphics and clear sound, and powerful compression/ decompression technologies for various types of data including graphics and sound. For more information: www.axell.co.jp/en/.

About Sequence Design

Sequence Design accelerates the ability of SoC designers to bring high-performance, power-aware ICs quickly to market. Sequence Design-For-Power solutions give customers the competitive advantage necessary to excel in aggressive technology markets. For more information: http://www.sequencedesign.com.

All trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.