Jackson said Avanti will continue to sell the existing Apollo toolset and will aim the more expensive Astro at aggressive process technologies. Over time, he said, Avanti expects that Astro will become the company's dominant layout product. The concurrency is what's key. Physisys runs concurrent timing and signal-integrity optimization throughout the placement and routing process, Jackson noted. Timing constraints can come from Synopsys Design Constraint files.
Users can provide constraints for cross talk, power rail design and clock skew management.
Support for signal electromigration will come in a later release. Concurrent with timing and signal integrity, Physisys provides synthesis optimization. Jackson said this capability is superior to that offered by Avanti's existing Saturn tool. Early on, he said, the synthesis optimization works on a large scale and might resynthesize blocks. By the time the design is going through routing, the optimizations are more localized in nature, such as cell resizing or buffer insertion.