Effective EM/IR analysis for leading-edge FPGA designs using Siemens mPower Analog

Efinix Titanium FPGAs minimize size, cost, and power usage while maximizing efficiency. To deliver promised performance and ensure profitable yield, Efinix must quickly and accurately predict and prevent electromigration (EM) and voltage (IR) drop effects. Steve Chin of Efinix explains how the mPower Analog power integrity analysis tool provides Efinix with the capabilities it needs for fast, accurate, block-to-full-chip EM/IR analysis of their Titanium FPGA designs.

Steve Chin of Efinix explains how the mPower Analog tool provides Efinix with fast, accurate, power integrity analysis from block to full-chip for their Titanium FPGA designs.

Efinix customers need their complex, high-performance Titanium FPGA designs to minimize power consumption within an aggressive transistor density goal. To deliver, Efinix must be able to quickly and accurately predict and prevent electromigration (EM) and voltage (IR) drop effects to ensure good power distribution, find and eliminate hotspots, and increase yield. Existing market solutions lacked the capacity and performance for analysis of the entire Titanium product.

Steve Chin, senior director of IC engineering at Efinix, explains why Efinix turned to the Siemens mPower power integrity analysis platform to obtain the capabilities they needed for fast, accurate, full-chip EM/IR analysis of their Titanium FPGA designs. With no artificially enforced digital methodology, and a flat transistor analysis without elaborate views or modeling, the mPower platform analyzes custom layout and P&R IP in a single, seamless run. A fast GUI plot displays current, resistance, power, and IR drop per metal and device instance, and allows engineers to quickly toggle between layout and results.

The results? The mPower platform delivered full-chip static IR within 24 hours turnaround on existing servers equipped with 2TB of RAM, successfully analyzing several hundred million transistors where other solutions had previously been inadequate. Each iteration saved Efinix a week of manual analysis, and identified violations that manual inspection would have missed.