RedHawk-Sahara

RedHawk-Sahara is a fully integrated Power-Thermal-Electrical (PTE) analyses solution for SoC designs. It delivers accuracy, capacity, performance, and ease-of-use for fast convergence of power and thermal distribution analysis. With RedHawk-Sahara, designers can analyze the impact of temperature and temperature variation on leakage, timing, voltage-drop, and reliability.

Benefits & Capabilities

Fast convergence towards thermal equilibrium with efficient power-thermal iterative loop analysis
Accurate identification of temperature "hot-spots" and their impact on leakage power
3D thermal modeling and discretization
Efficient power-thermal-electrical iterative loop analysis
Impact on leakage, voltage drop, and reliability
Timing analysis with temperature variation

Thermal Challenge

For designs at 65nm and below, temperature distribution across the design has significant impacts on the performance and reliability of the system. There are several design parameters that are affected by the temperature. Leakage current increases with local temperature, which in turn increases the local heat generation. In order to achieve an accurate prediction of power dissipation, power dissipation and thermal distribution have to be considered simultaneously.

Timing Verification

Rising temperature decreases transistor drive strengths, thus leading to slower slew rates and gate delays. In addition, rising temperature increases interconnect delay and slew due to increased metal resistivity, and thus affects the setup and hold times of the circuits, as well as impacts the cross-talk noise between signal lines.

Reliability

The major limiting factor for reliability of an IC is electro-migration (EM) in the metal and via interconnects. EM describes the transport of mass in metals under the stress of high current density. EM increases exponentially with temperature, hence decreasing the interconnect reliability.

Thermal Equilibrium

The distribution of power dissipation in system determines the heat generation in the system. The resulting temperature profile in the system, on the other hand, has an impact on the power dissipation in the system. A stable solution of power and thermal distribution requires an iterative analysis of the Power-Thermal (PT) loop.

RedHawk-Sahara delivers an integrated solution for efficient power and thermal analysis. It uses the calculated power as the source for thermal simulation. Then it uses the generated new temperature profile to calculate the power. RedHawk-Sahara performs several iterations of the Power-Thermal loop to reach thermal equilibrium.

Impact on Timing, Voltage-Drop, and Reliability

The thermal distribution in a system also affects the resistance of all metal wires, which has an impact on the power dissipation in the wire, the self-heating of interconnects, and voltage drop across the system. As the power dissipation of the circuits is dependent on the local supply voltage amplitude, this creates the need for a second analysis loop between power distribution, thermal analysis, and resistance distribution, thus the Power-Thermal-Electrical (PTE) Loop.

Based on the converged power-thermal distribution, RedHawk-Sahara analyzes its impact on resistance extraction, wire electro-migration, and voltage drop. By considering the temperature variation across the chip, instead of using constant corner temperature values, RedHawk-Sahara also provides much more accurate full-chip, critical path, and clock timing for silicon sign-off.

Fully Integrated Electro-Thermal Solution

RedHawk-Sahara is a fully integrated solution for electro-thermal simulation. Its layout-driven platform encompasses:

Built-in power / thermal / noise library and custom macro characterization
Incremental RLC extraction for power, noise, and temperature
Tightly coupled power, thermal, and electrical kernel
High-capacity, high-performance network solver
Timing impact modeling
Circuit fix and optimization (FAO)
Single environment for analysis, diagnosis, and debugging

RedHawk-Sahara delivers full-chip capacity and transistor-level accuracy, within a unified analysis and debugging environment. Its high-capacity, high-performance 3D thermal analysis engine with silicon-proven RedHawk transient analysis engine provides highly effective Power-Thermal-Electrical analysis of SoC designs.

Downloads Contact Us Site Map

Highlight