Designers share tips at Magma user conference

Designers share tips at Magma user conference
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Presentations at a recent Magma Design Automation user group conference provided some valuable tips for users of Magma's IC physical design tools, according to attendees of the Fusion '03 conference. Several attendees reviewed the conference in a recent E-Mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG) mailing.

The Fusion '03 conference was held in September in Santa Clara, Calif. It drew over 120 attendees, 14 papers, and 10 exhibitors at the Partner's Expo, according to Pallab Chatterjee, chairman of Magma's Fusion user group.

Writing in the recent ESNUG 420 bulletin, Chatterjee said he was very pleased about the attendance and the quality of the papers given. He noted that Veritools, Fishtail Design Automation, and TSMC presented partner papers, and Silicon Metrics gave a partner tutorial. Silicon Metrics has since been acquired by Magma.

Chatterjee reported that the best paper award went to "Hacking Magma for fun and profit," by Sandeep Mirchandani of Broadcom. "Basically the paper was full of cool tips and tricks you can do with the unified data model and their M-Tcl interface to be able to check on the progress of a design and automatically implement fixes," Chatterjee wrote. "It was pretty cool of Broadcom in this age of content paranoia to actually allow one of their working chip guys to present scripts and steps that could be used and interpreted by other folks."

Two runner-up papers were "Stability analysis of RTL to GDS flow" by Howard Landman, and "Taping out WASSP using Magma tool suites" by Hari Puravankara of Wipro in India. The former presented an engineering statistical review of Magma tools from a repeatability and performance standpoint. The latter focused on the design of a custom chip built in TSMC's 0.13 micron process.

The partner paper that drew the most interest and questions, Chatterjee said, was "Timing issues and false paths/multicycle paths" by Ajay Daga of Fishtail Design Automation.

Other commentators in the ESNUG 420 mailing had mostly positive reviews of Fusion '03. One, however, said too much time was taken up by "Why we chose Magma" papers, and another noted that there were too many case studies.

"From the papers presented by Magma, the most surprising to me was the one about Blast Create, the new Magma front end environment," wrote Philippe Sarrazin of Teradiant Networks. "Magma makes a very strong claim about run time, cell area, timing closure and tool capacity. Is it real?"

Presentations from Hari Puravankara, Ajay Daga, and Sandeep Mirchandani are available as items 51 and 52 at the Deepchip download page.