DESIGN AUTOMATION CONFERENCE—Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNS) today announced the Cadence® Liberate™ Trio Characterization Suite, the industry’s first unified library characterization tool that runs both statistical and nominal characterization in parallel and provides complete validation of standard cell libraries. Employing advanced machine learning techniques, this tool uses smart interpolation to help determine the critical corners that need to be characterized. By making characterization processes thoroughly distributed and massively parallel, it has been fully optimized for running on cloud-based servers. In addition, the Liberate Trio suite offers up to 3X performance increase by running corners in parallel and natively running statistical and nominal characterization together.

“Characterization is an extremely time-consuming activity with increasing corners, larger libraries, and new data formats,” said Ron Moore, vice president of business planning, Physical Design Group, Arm. “By using Arm’s Artisan Physical IP, we validated Cadence’s Liberate Trio Characterization Suite and saw a notable improvement in turnaround time using the same number of CPUs. This is an important step in continuing to deliver high-performance libraries to our mutual customers.”

The Liberate Trio Characterization Suite is part of the Cadence Cloud portfolio, also being announced today (see press release). For more information on the new Cadence Liberate Trio Characterization Suite, please visit www.cadence.com/go/liberatetrio.

Machine Learning Helps Predict Critical Corners

The machine learning algorithms in the Liberate Trio suite help guide the designer, predicting critical corners and helping designers decide what corners need to be characterized. The tool uses smart interpolation, not just linear interpolation, to ensure accuracy.

“The creation of accurate timing, power and noise models for advanced-node libraries is becoming increasingly complex,” said Vinod Kariat, corporate vice president of research and development at Cadence. “The Liberate Trio Characterization Suite simplifies library characterization by enabling characterization across multiple corners and natively integrating nominal and variation in the same run. This significantly improves turnaround time and ease of use.”

Designers today have an increasing need for high-throughput characterization and fast, accurate re-characterization of custom corners. Cadence created a unified graphical user interface (GUI) cockpit that lets designers use a single script to efficiently launch and monitor characterization. This addresses the challenge of maintaining consistency of data across the large number of process, voltage and temperature (PVT) corners. It also helps designers properly mine all the data that is collected.

Optimized for Cloud-Based Server Farms

Addressing the parallel nature of library characterization over hundreds of cells, characterization uses multiple CPUs to improve throughput. Now, Cadence has optimized the Liberate Trio suite to be fully cloud ready, whether employed in a public or company private cloud, and scalable to over a thousand CPUs. Characterization of a library containing over 1000 cells that would normally take weeks now can be turned around in days.

In related news, Cadence today introduced the Cadence Cloud portfolio, the first broad cloud portfolio for the development of electronic systems and semiconductors. See the news release at www.cadence.com/go/cloudnews.

About Cadence

Cadence enables electronic systems and semiconductor companies to create the innovative end products that are transforming the way people live, work and play. Cadence software, hardware and semiconductor IP are used by customers to deliver products to market faster. The company’s System Design Enablement strategy helps customers develop differentiated products—from chips to boards to systems—in mobile, consumer, cloud datacenter, automotive, aerospace, IoT, industrial and other market segments. Cadence is listed as one of Fortune Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For. Learn more at www.cadence.com.

© 2018 Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Cadence, the Cadence logo and the other Cadence marks found at www.cadence.com/go/trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc.

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