Virtuoso Studio: The Right Tool for the Right Job

Our new AI-powered custom design solution, Virtuoso Studio, leverages our 30 years of industry knowledge and leadership providing innovative features, reimagined infrastructure for unrivalled productivity, and new levels of integration that stretch beyond classic design boundaries. In this blog series, learn how the best analog design tools just got better to help you keep pace with your challenging design issues. 

By Sravasti Nair, Product Engineering Group Director, and Girish Vaidyanathan, Sr. Product Manager, Virtuoso Studio, Cadence

Choosing the right tool for the right job is a mantra that is true to succeed in meeting the challenges of analog mixed-signal design as well!

AMS design is a complicated task, and there are many factors to consider, such as the involvement of digital blocks in an analog environment. A few of these digital blocks are recursive and small enough to either require a custom layout for some parts or are small enough to go through the pain of setting up the scripts. Therefore, it is always a challenge for design engineers to generate constraint-compliant layouts quickly with high-quality results for AMS design.

The problem worsens at advanced nodes due to increasing turnaround time (TAT) and the surging number of design rule checks (DRC). The requirement for multiple tools for distinct design parts is another challenge, making the implementation tedious and time-consuming. Advanced-node processes need new flexible methodologies and software enhancements to enable designers to select and use the right tool to achieve the best quality of results (QoR) without any need for other external tools.

To meet such issues and help designers, Cadence has developed a solution—Virtuoso Studio. It leverages the power of the Innovus Implementation System to resolve the issues in AMS design at advanced nodes. It enables designers to invoke the Innovus engines (GigaPlace and NanoRoute) from within Virtuoso Layout Suite for digital blocks and avoids tedious, time-consuming transitions. We are pleased to introduce Virtuoso Studio as an enabler in applying the “right tool for the right job.”

Challenges of AMS Design Implementation at Advanced Node

With technological innovations and applications such as HPC, autonomous driving, mobile, and IoT, the momentum is increasing toward adopting AMS design at advanced nodes. However, the AMS design implementation at advanced nodes using the traditional schemes poses many challenges for design implementation engineers, such as:

• Involves critical issues like signal coupling and process variations
• Stringent placement and routing rules
• Increasing complexity
• Difficult to maintain AMS layout quality
• Implementation of small digital blocks
• Increasing TAT and design challenges

Solution: Virtuoso Studio

Cadence integrated the Innovus Implementation System into the well-known and industry-leading Virtuoso Layout Suite to overcome the issues of implementing small digital blocks in custom design layout implementation at advanced nodes. The Virtuoso environment has been the go-to tool for custom digital cell design, and with the recent integration of Cadence Innovus Implementation System, it has become even more efficient and streamlined for AMS designs. Virtuoso Studio offers complete automated placement and routing solutions for all design styles—device, standard cell, and chip assembly as shown in the following figure.

Automated place-and-route features

Key technologies and features of this integration are:

• The Virtuoso Studio leverages Innovus Implementation’s advanced-node support capabilities and provides an automatic standard cell placement solution by integrating GigaPlace.
• GigaPlace and NanoRoute support most placement and routing constraints specifiable in Virtuoso.
• GigaPlace provides comprehensive node support with high performance and capacity, including automatic interoperable row generation, custom placement, and tap and filler cell insertion
• The seamless integration of NanoRoute in the Virtuoso environment for standard cell routing helps target the non-timing-driven custom block designs with instances up to 2000.
• It checks interoperability and routing issues and offers a graphical user interface (GUI) use model.

Benefits of Leveraging the Virtuoso Studio

Virtuoso Studio allows layout designers to leverage the powerful place and route engines from the familiar Virtuoso environment.

This integration offers benefits such as:

• High-quality results in advanced nodes
• Faster runtime
• Mix and match custom layout editing and auto place and route flow
• Routing on nets with complex constraints like shielding and matching
• GUI-driven interface capable of launching Innovus engines and getting the layout results without complex scripting.
• Comprehensive pre-routing data to double-check before handing off to Innovus
• Graphical constraint management through Routing Constraint Manager, consistent with other automated place and route flows inside Virtuoso Studio like device level and chip assembly
• Graphical routing result analysis using Routing Result Browser to check the quality of results
• Automated constraint checker for verifying constraint adherence in the router result

The Right Tool for the Right Job

Virtuoso Studio offers the flexibility of using custom layout editing capabilities to craft critical portions of the layout and invoke the Innovus engine for less complex, digital portions without leaving their familiar design environment. This ensures that designers can choose the right tool for the right job, leading to better designs and faster turnaround times.

Learn more about Virtuoso Studio.