RTL-To-GDSII Flow Rolls For Structured ASICs

A collaboration between Magma Design Automation and ChipX has produced a unified RTL-to-GDSII structured ASIC design flow. Based on Magma's Blast Create and Blast Fusion tools, the flow supports ChipX's CX5000 family of structured-ASIC devices. The companies' mutual customers as well as ChipX itself will use it to deliver structured-ASIC designs or to migrate FPGA designs to the CX5000 parts.

Among the advantages offered by the Magma/ChipX flow are structure-specific optimizations to maximize area utilization and performance. Physical-synthesis technology tailored for the ChipX architecture handles physical site constraints and overlapping site locations. This technology lets the tools select and efficiently place the correct implementation of a functional cell to meet design-specific requirements.

The flow performs heterogeneous placement to simultaneously place cells and macros, including the placement of a large number of embedded and distributed memory blocks. Timing, power, and signal-integrity analysis is integrated with synthesis, floorplanning, placement and routing, clock-tree synthesis, physical timing optimization, and RC extraction. This level of integration brings fast design turnaround times and an efficient path to design closure.

ChipX will provide customer access to the flow as well as support functions.