Situation
Toshiba’s Broadband IC design group is tasked with producing the company’s highest performance integrated circuits. In 2004, they were challenged to produce floating-point units that would perform at 2 Ghz using a 65 nm process. Hardly a trivial task—so Toshiba turned to Arithmatica for assistance.
Solution
Arithmatica provided a combination of tools, IP and design services to assist Toshiba’s engineers in producing the world’s fastest integrated circuit for its time. Arithmatica’s design services group optimized Toshiba’s RTL code, investigated datapath architectures, synthesized the design for performance and area using Arithmatica’s patented silicon math IP, and returned optimized netlists to Toshiba. Arithmatica’s consultants then provided guidance to Toshiba’s physical design team to efficiently integrate the floating-point units into the target IC.
Toshiba also licensed CellMath Designer to design ICs for other consumer electronics applications in their 65 nm process technology. After extensive evaluation using real designs, it was clear to Toshiba’s management that CellMath Designer would help them achieve their aggressive performance goals and reduce die area.
Results
Toshiba was able to meet all of their industry-leading performance goals while realizing a significant area and power savings. In addition, Toshiba’s engineers were able to quickly implement CellMath Designer in their existing design flow.
Client Perspective
”Our datapath results show an average of 20 percent area savings. Learning CellMath Designer was easy; our design team was able to use the tool and achieve good results after just two afternoons of training.”
Mitsuo Saito, Vice President of Engineering, System LSI Division, Toshiba Semiconductor
