Blaze MO equips chip designers with the ability to get the most out of 90nm and below process technologies. With Blaze MO, designers drive their power and performance requirements into the manufacturing flow, effectively “turbo charging” the manufacturing process. Blaze enhanced designs are faster, less leaky and have better parametric yield.

Blaze MO enables designers to:
• Minimize leakage power
• Improve timing margin
• Increase parametric yield

Blaze MO performs a comprehensive power and timing optimization of a finished design just prior to the handoff to manufacturing. No changes to any of the design layers are made during this optimization. Instead, Blaze MO outputs an annotation layer in the handoff GDSII database that gives detailed guidance to the OPC flow used in manufacturing.

Blaze MO annotations in the design are used in manufacturing to guide the OPC process to a solution that is optimized to meet power and timing constraints. In contrast to the design-oblivious OPC flow that has been used in the past, with Blaze MO every physical feature is fabricated in the way that best supports the design objectives.

Reduced Leakage Power and Improved Timing
Leakage power is especially sensitive to gate length variation; it increases exponentially with decreased gate length. Blaze MO optimizes designs by making small (≤3nm per edge) adjustments to individual gate lengths. This is a powerful technique that results in leakage reduction of 20% or more for typical 90nm designs that are already heavily optimized using multi-Vt libraries, multiple drive strengths, and low-leakage processes.

Blaze MO also improves timing margin by controlling gate length based on timing criticality – slightly increasing gate length for hold-critical paths and slightly decreasing it for setup-critical paths. Just as with the biases for leakage, these changes are within the allowed range for the process and are achieved by providing specific guidance to the manufacturing OPC flow.

Design Flow Integration
Blaze MO is built on the Open Access database. It integrates easily into existing design flows from Cadence, Synopsys and Magma using industry standard file formats, including SDC, Liberty, Verilog, LEF/DEF, DSPF/SPEF, and GDSII. Blaze MO annotated GDSII output can be used to drive any commercial OPC tool.

Blaze MO fits into the design flow directly before handoff to manufacturing.

Users interact with Blaze MO through Tcl scripts or the graphical user interface.