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Efinix implements effective EM/IR analysis for leading-edge FPGA designs with the mPower platform

Screenshots of the various mPower cockpit elements, including multi-pane synchronized GUI, IR path tracing, Calibre RVE integration, and browsable interactive reports.
The Efinix line of 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 and voltage (IR) drop effects. Power integrity analysis tools must run accurately and efficiently throughout the design cycle, and accommodate increasing data sizes in each product generation. The mPower power integrity platform provides Efinix with the capabilities it needs for fast, accurate, block-to-full-chip EM/IR analysis of their Titanium FPGA designs.

The mPower platform 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 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. 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 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.

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