Implementation
Collaborating with your team is good, and having access to all the data sets the stage, but now you've got work to do. It's time to implement. Often times, the knobs that you can turn on your EDA tools have indeterminate results. One of our customers was trying to close timing on a very critical datapath block and was lamenting that he knew what to do but needed better control to be able do it. It’s an increasingly common problem. How did Tuscany help him out...?
In the past, this engineer was forced to deal with text based internal tools in order to get the placement correct. This was an arduous process. Understanding all of the different parts of the datapath and how they played together was difficult to conceptualize without actually seeing what was being done. Each experiment took hours to run, since editing the text file, rerunning placement and then getting timing information back, all took too much time.
Tuscany’s structured design accelerator solved this problem by allowing the engineer to still take his first stab at the structure using a text-based approach, but then provided all of the capability he needed to graphically manipulate and quickly perform what-if analysis on the design.
What if he changed a block to be tiled a certain way, and moved it to a new location? Immediate feedback. Perhaps that wasn't the right change, so he presses undo, goes back, and tries moving the control logic to a new location. That's better, and then he implements a new idea that is now apparent. What used to take hours was reduced to seconds, allowing him to not only get the results he needed, but to get them more quicklyr. An important thing to bear in mind is that improved response like this doesn’t just get you a quicker answer. In EDA, that type of advance can fundamentally change the way engineers work, and achieve results that were not previously feasible.
Many of our customers are seeing a 25% drop in power and similar improvements in performance as a result of using structured placement for optimization. Tuscany's solution provides an easy way to edit and manipulate the design. This reduces the amount of time it takes to learn how to use a structured methodology, and dramatically increases engineering productivity.
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