Ed Sperling at the SLD blog wrote an interesting article a while ago on the challenges facing designers at 32 and 28 nm. In the article he lamented that the big EDA companies are leaving their customers to do the hard work of designing with variability in mind.
He is right that the big EDA companies seem to be mostly watching from the sidelines. It is the small EDA companies that are pushing forward with innovations around variation. Ed asserts that it’s “difficult stuff”. We agree; especially if you are trying to deliver practical solutions.
For example, we have worked closely with TSMC for more than 2 years building a high accuracy static timing tool based upon transistor level models and a very novel, high performance approach to statistical calculations. Think accuracy of Monte Carlo SPICE but with hundreds of thousands of paths per hour.
The result of that collaboration - Amber Path FX – was just announced this spring.
