SYNAPTIC completes design synthesis tool flow

A joint industry/academia consortium, supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme, has reported the successful conclusion of a three-year project and the release of its design-synthesis tool flow and related litho-friendly cell libraries and evaluation metrics. The SYNAPTIC research project included eight partner organizations from across Europe and Brazil who worked together to develop innovative regularity-centric design methods and Electronics Design Automation (EDA) tools. The goal of the project was to reduce limitations in both logical and physical implementation effectiveness associated with technology scaling and advanced sub-wavelength lithography. Through the development of new pattern-aware logic synthesis and implementation techniques, SYNAPTIC addressed critical problems such as systematic variability reduction, DFM (Design for Manufacturing) and yield improvement (at the cell, IP/macro, and system levels), sophisticated area/performance trade-offs, and system-level/architectural predictability and sign-off, for the European semiconductor industry. The goal has been to sustain the scaling predicted by Moore’s Law into advanced nanometer technologies. The libraries, tools, and methodologies developed within the SYNAPTIC project can enable synthesis and implementation of several designs based on a reduced set of regular layout patterns wit...