Sequence Clock Power, Voltage Island Analysis Bests Competition; Simplifies Tricky Analysis and Optimization While Chopping Up To 40% Off Power Budget.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- At this year's Design Automation Conference in San Francisco, customers will be introduced to Sequence Design's Clock Power Analysis and Voltage Island Analysis options for its low-power physical analysis and optimization tools, CoolTime and CoolPower. Sequence's PowerTheater-65 already manages and analyzes these silicon-aware effects at RTL.

The Clock Power Analysis option enables significant reductions in clock network power, often the biggest component of dynamic power. Voltage Island Analysis lets users easily and quickly optimize islands, speeding design time and accuracy.

"The tribe has spoken, and they are demanding these huge additions to the Cool Products low-power design portfolio," said Sequence president and CEO, Vic Kulkarni. "We are leaving the competition in the dust with greatly improved performance paired with unequalled user friendliness."

CoolTime and CoolPower are both concurrent and SI-aware, providing fast design closure times by preventing time-consuming iterations between separate timing, SI, and power analysis and optimization tools.

CoolTime benchmarks consistently demonstrate its ability to scalp its nearest competitor. For example, on a 25M placeable instances design, CoolTime runtime was one day vs. five days and memory usage was 38% smaller compared to the competing tool. Plus, only CoolTime has integrated timing, event simulation, and extraction - the foundation technologies that make it the most accurate solution for dynamic voltage drop.

CoolPower contains the industry's richest set of power optimization capabilities. Both dynamic and leakage power can be automatically optimized using CoolPower's cell resizing and Multi-Vt cell swapping features respectively, and MTCMOS power gating analysis offers the most effective method of reducing leakage power by 10X to 100X or more.

Clock Power Analysis

The Clock Power Analysis option addresses clock network power consumption, often the single largest component of dynamic power (typically as much as 40 % of total power). Until now, the ability to easily determine power consumption in clock networks has been absent, so when the clock physical design is changed, designers have little knowledge as to how much power is saved as a result. The Clock Power Analysis option is easy to use and quickly produces clock tree power consumption details, enabling designers to run various trials to determine the most optimal, user-controlled clock tree structure with the lowest power consumption.

Voltage Island Analysis

This option addresses dynamic power consumption through the support of multiple voltage islands. Commonly deployed, but often with substantial effort and pain, voltage islands utilize multiple supply voltages such that the higher performance portions of the design are powered by a higher supply voltage (say, 1.2V) while the lower performance portions are powered by a lower supply voltage (say, 0.9V). Substantial power savings result, often 20% to 40% or more, since the reduction in power supply voltage produces a quadratic reduction in dynamic power for the island with the lower power supply. The Voltage Island Analysis option enables the quick and easy analysis and optimization of multiple voltage islands. Voltage islands can also be powered by power gating switches to implement power islands, and can thus be shut down altogether to save leakage when inactive. Sequence's tools support timing analysis with voltage derating due to IR drop across the switches, enabling designers to understand the switches' effects on timing.

Sequence DAC Highlights

Sequence (Booth 1614): Demos of all Sequence products and their implementation in a complete power-integrity flow will be available at DAC by advance registration at http://www.sequencedesign.com/dac-2006/demos/registration.php

--Demos of new Silicon Aware PowerTheater 65, CoolPower/CoolTime with multi-voltage analysis options, Speedview-AMS for faster full-custom analysis, and more

--Intel (Booth 3143): Live demo of PowerTheater 65 and presentation as an Intel technology partner

--Forte (Booth 1428): Presenting technology overview and ESL / PowerTheater design flow

--Virage Logic (Booth 3111): VIP Partner, presenting complementary solutions with Virage Logic

--Electronic News "Breakfast in the Valley:" Vic Kulkarni joins an editorial panel hosted by editor-in-chief, Ed Sperling, discussing low-power design for consumer electronics - other participants include Bluespec, Magma, and Mentor Graphics 

--Sequence TAB: Annual meeting of Sequence Technical Advisory Board

Price/Availability

Price for the Voltage Island Analysis and Clock Power Analysis options, available as options for Sequence's CoolTime and CoolPower, begins at $40,000 each, and both ship August 2006. For more information: [e-mail].

About Sequence

Sequence Design accelerates the ability of SoC designers to bring high-performance, power-aware ICs quickly to market. Sequence's power and signal-integrity software solutions give customers the competitive advantage necessary to excel in aggressive technology markets, despite the demanding complexity and time-to-market issues of nanometer design. Sequence serves over 150 customers worldwide, in application segments such as consumer, wireless, mobile computing, multimedia, cell phones, digital cameras, network-on-chip processors, and other power-sensitive markets. The company was named by Reed Electronics as one of the top 10 companies to watch in the electronics industry, and was recently selected as one of high-tech's Top 100 companies by siliconindia magazine. Sequence has worldwide development and field-service operations and is privately held. Please see sequencedesign.com.

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