Magma’s Titan Adopted by Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited to Improve Analog Design Productivity

“Fujitsu Semiconductor produces a variety of large-scale integration (LSI) circuits for automotive, consumer, industrial, networking, and wireless applications,” said Masaru Ito, director of the Technology Development Division, IP & Technology Development and Manufacturing Unit of Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited. “To keep up with our customers’ changing demands, we need to minimize development time. With the seamless integration of Titan ADX’s optimization technology into our existing analog design flow, we can now very quickly change the specifications such as reducing the power budget on an LSI design, and port our analog IP to new processes. This improvement in our design flow efficiency enables us to deliver our next-generation LSI circuits on time while reducing development costs.”

Unlike time consuming simulation-based optimization tools, Titan ADX leverages a unique high-level abstraction of an analog circuit, called a FlexCell. It applies this abstraction in an advanced non-linear, constraint-based optimization algorithm to allow designers to quickly and easily port the IP to any process and to optimize the circuit for specific power and area requirements.

“With the growing number of process, voltage and temperature corners, it’s impossible to fully optimize today’s analog circuits by hand,” said Anirudh Devgan, general manager of Magma's Custom Design Business Unit. “With its advanced optimization technology and FlexCell models, Titan ADX can not only optimize analog circuits with hundreds of process, voltage and temperature (PVT) corners simultaneously, it can automatically reduce power or area by up to 50 percent. Fujitsu Semiconductor’s integration of Titan ADX into its mixed-signal design flow illustrates the growing demand for Magma’s unique analog design solutions.”

Titan ADX and FlexCells: Improving Analog Design Productivity and Enabling Reuse
Magma’s Titan ADX and FlexCell models greatly improve productivity, accelerating the creation of new analog IP and simplifying analog IP reuse. A FlexCell represents a circuit in a mathematical, parameterized model format that includes circuit topology, functionality and physical information such as resistance and capacitance. Because they are process independent, modular and reusable, FlexCells can be easily targeted to new process technologies and optimized for different design specifications. After optimization, Titan ADX outputs a schematic with a netlist that meets the design specifications across multiple PVT corners. FlexCell models include testbenches, allowing further validation of the netlist using Magma’s FineSim™ SPICE simulator.


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