Silicon Updates: Cadence Pegasus Verification System for Design Rule Check (DRC)

Design Rule Check (DRC) is one of the major steps of physical verification in chip fabrication. DRC is the process of verifying if the physical layout of a given chip are met with the recommended parameters. With the development in technology, the complexity of DRC has been increasing from few years in the past and the available DRC solutions are unable to serve the purpose of DRC. The existing DRC tools take a turnaround time of several days, when processed using the optimal configuration with existing tools consisting of 64 CPUs.

When tried with increased number of CPUs, the scalability of DRC has reduced and hence, it cannot be achieved in this direction. To address these challenges, Cadence has introduced a new DRC verification system called Cadence Pegasus Verification system. The Cadence Pegasus Verification System is a cloud-ready physical verification signoff solution, which enables engineers to deliver advanced-node integrated circuits (ICs) to market faster. When compared to the existing DRC verification systems, both the turnaround time and performance were improved with the Pegasus verification system - the turnaround time is reduced from days to hours and the performance is observed to be improved by 10x.
Read more: Cadence Protium S1 FPGA-based prototyping platform for ASICs. 

Time mapping with Cadence Pegasus Verification System

The Pegasus verification system differs from the existing DRC systems with its capabilities of innovative architecture and native cloud processing; this enhances the flexibility of the computing environment in using the Pegasus verification system. The major advancement of the Peagsus verification system is its pipelined infrastructure with stream processing delivering near-linear scalability across 100s of CPUs. The Pegasus system is designed with a gigascale technology that enables DRC signoff for the complete chip, with a dramatic reduction in time for verification. Candence claims that the Pegasus verification system was designed to serve complex DRC very efficiently in the near future, supporting all the upcoming technologies. You can download the data sheet of Pegasus verification system here.
Read more: Cadence Xelium Multi-core parallel simulation engine.