I took a little extra care dressing up that Monday... My 4-year-old dream had come true and that needed some celebration. All dressed up and simply forgetting the Monday blues I have been suffering ever since I took a job in this part of the city… I was ready to go to the office. Office? Well yes office, but, no it was not my work, the team, or my boss that caused me the Monday blues… It was the thought of having to struggle and wrestle my way through nasty potholes and trying to keep my relatively new car from bumping into a rusty, old fruit cart by the side, or a cyclist racing me to reach the traffic light before I do that gave me the blues. All had changed this bright and sunny Monday morning… With my car scrubbed clean and shiny, I started my journey. A 15 miles trip to my office on the ‘new expressway’ that opened to the public just this weekend. Expressway? You got it… my dream was the expressway, a road free of speed breakers and potholes, pedestrians and fruit carts, a road that would, at last, let me test the limits of my car, and of course a road that would help me reach my office on time. Heaven… don’t you think? So, as I expected, I almost flew across the Expressway and reached office still impeccably dressed, fresh, and ready to conquer the world… and not already tired and stressed after braving through the traffic. If you are a layout designer who has recently switched to the new XStream In translator, you might be feeling the same as I did driving along the Expressway. Because the new IC617/12.2 XStream In translator with its latest performance upgrades has got transformed into no less than a Translation Expressway that allows layout engineers to perform translations in a jiffy! A layout design has to go through several iterations during the designing process and perform multiple data exchanges across tools for processing such as DRC removal, LVL verification, chip-level integration, chip-finishing editing, and foundry-level verification. And, at each stage, a large-sized, hierarchical layout needs to be imported into Virtuoso. Now, if your import tool is slow, it will be a speed breaker in your designing process affecting your production timelines. What you need is a superfast, high-performance import tool to speed up these exchanges and save hours of development time. What is also very important is that the translation tool ensures that data integrity and import predictability is not adversely impacted during these exchanges. Multiple optimizations, especially the innovative approach to parallelize the XStream In process by leveraging the memory-disk of the system running XStream In to decompose processing into separate CPU and IO processing threads, has brought about a major performance enhancement in XStream In runtimes. What’s more, performance of XStream In is no longer end-user machine dependent. The graph below shows how I/O configurations caused huge variance in XStream In runtimes in older version, but do not matter much in the latest version. Our internal testing has benchmarked up to 35X gain in the performance of the new XStream In translator. Corroborative feedback from our key customers using XStream Import also report major performance gain with IC6.1.7/ICADV12.2 across design styles and sizes. The table below shows the performance gain by our different customers while translating designs of different sizes while using IC6.1.6/ICADV12.1 and IC6.1.7/ICADV12.2 XStream In versions. Design Size IC6.1.6/ICADV12.1 ( Sec) IC6.1.7/ICADV12.2 ( Sec) Gain 40 GB 26100 4800 5.4x 8 GB 1128 456 2.5x 94 MB 308 70 4.4x 108 MB 1904 53 35.7x 442 MB 2923 72 40.5x This Monday when I had my weekly call with Ralph, my key customer for XStream In, he seemed to be unusually pleasant and kind — quite unlike him. I was certainly upbeat because I had saved myself about 30 precious morning minutes getting to office using the Expressway, so his usual harping wouldn’t have bothered me much. But, he seemed quite cheerful and admiring as he had used the Expressway too—the Translation Expressway! Related Resources Design Translation Using XStream Translator For more information about Cadence circuit design products and services, visit www.cadence.com . About Virtuosity Virtuosity has been our most viewed and admired blog series for a long time that has brought to fore some lesser known, yet very useful software and documentation improvements, and also shed light on some exciting new offerings in Virtuoso. We are now expanding the scope of this series by broadcasting the voice of different bloggers and experts, who would continue to preserve the legacy of Virtuosity , and try to give new dimensions to it by covering topics across the length and breadth of Virtuoso, and a lot more… Click Subscribe to visit the Subscription box at the top of the page in which you can submit your email address to receive notifications of our latest Virtuosity posts. Happy Reading! Sucharita Mehta![]()
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