Intento Design Expands Analog Automation with IDX-PVT, Eliminating the Need for Design-by-Verification

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Paris -- October 8, 2020 -- Intento Design flagship tool ID-Xplore was introduced in 2015, aimed to assist analog designers in creating correct-by-construction, perfectly sized design in seconds. Fully integrated in the Cadence ADE, ID-Xplore is a technology independent analog design acceleration and migration tool for schematic centric design flows.

ID-Xplore is now successfully implemented in analog flows of large European IDMs, notably STMicroelectronics. Design houses and fabless also benefit from ID-Xplore unique bias and sizing exploration, rapidly finding many typical solutions with various performance gains and tradeoffs.

With the number of corners often reaching thousands, intuitively added “design margin” doesn’t work anymore. Designers spend time in endless loops, just to reach one well centered design with enough margin to cover the performance and satisfy the PVT variation.

IDX-PVT gives the control back to analog designers to quickly determine which of the found typical valid solutions are passing the PVT corners. Worst-case corners are quickly detected thanks to smart design space partitioning algorithms.

ID-Xplore featuring IDX-PVT goes a step further in analog design acceleration. IDX-PVT enables fast and efficient design centering, effectively immunizing chips against process variation.

Raouf Khalil, Design Director explains: “Without IDX-PVT, designer has to go through dozens of iteration to find the design that covers at minimum few hundreds of corners with the lowest power budget and the smallest area. And all that was done manually.”

Even more powerful with this new feature, ID-Xplore/PVT quickly finds perfectly centered robust designs that satisfy performances, power, and area requirements while taking into account the design corners.