Library Technologies, Inc.
Library Technologies, Inc. develops and markets design and analysis tools for integrated circuit design. The tools and products are integrated together. They interface to popular chip designs flows. SolutionWare product line covers characterization and modeling requirements for standard cells, IO and memories including functional verification and design library generation.
CcsTest is a suite of tools which are used for verifying the accuracy of of an existing Liberty library. They are part of SolutionWare. They can be automatically executed by makelib ccstests
which carries out all intermediate steps for all the corners and library cells. The tool suite was originally designed to test Current Source Models like CCS and ECSM.
CellOpt is a dynamic circuit level power/timing optimizer designed to minimize the power dissipation of standard build blocks like logic gates and sequential elements, with optional timing constraints, by properly sizing the devices used in the circuit. After all, energy is consumed by these components, and how well they are designed and how well they fit to their particular use on the chip is of paramount importance.
ChipTimer is a design optimization and timing closure tool for high performance designs. It is well known that algorithms and architecture are the most important element of performance, but implementation has a lot of leeway impacting performance.
Product Name: PowerTeam
Product Category:
Design Libraries
- ASIC and IC Design
PowerTeam is a dynamic power simulator. It is integrated with Verilog and provides power simulation and analysis capabilities to Verilog on top of Verilog's functional and timing simulation capabilities. Interface to Verilog is through PLI. Verilog-XL and VCS are supported. In addition to PLI interface, power simulation requires a power library which describes different power dissipation modes of the library elements. Various power dissipation parameters are also contained in this library.
Solutionware library generation tools offer the most comprehensive set of tools for characterization and model generation. They are optimized for speed and efficiency. They can cover even non-standard cells like one-hot muxes, semi-synchronous flops, synchronizers, clock gating cells, dynamic flops and dual edge flops, and even cells which mux between flip-flop and latch behavior. Characterization time for a flip-flop could be as small as 2 minutes for 7x7 tables generated without interpolation.
UnBlock is a library generator for Structured Custom Layout Blocks. These blocks are usually handcrafted, don't use an ASIC library, and usually take advantage of circuit and layout techniques which are normally avoided in standard cell designs. The main problem with these blocks is the difficulty of functional and timing verification. Transistor level timing and functional simulators are the only available tools designers can rely on.
YieldOpt addresses the issue of variation of process and its impact on the timing aspects of the chip design. Process variation is becoming more and more significant with each new process generation. A single sigma parameter was thought to be sufficient to summarize the variation of previous generations of processes, the variation for new generations may require tens of new independent random variables to characterize the variations on the same die, same wafer, and different lots. Coupled with supply voltage sensitivity, and new temperature effects, it becomes quite a challenge to find proper process and environmental conditions for design and timing analysis.
