Electronic Design Automation (EDA)
Dataram offers reliable, high-performance memory products for a variety of computational-intensive electronic design automation (EDA) applications. Engineers use EDA software tools for many aspects of designing chips and systems, including:
- Timing closure
- Design for yield
- Signal integrity
- Power management
- Design for test
- RTL and equivalence checking and verification
- System level analysis
- Functional verification
All of these activities depend on robust computing memory. While processor speed and power significantly contribute to overall workstation and application performance, memory capacity can actually deliver greater performance gains and ROI than additional or faster processors.
In particular, functional verification can consume as much as 70% of overall chip development time and requires the most powerful servers and workstations. Memory plays a key role in the amount of time the system requires to complete a functional verification run.
Running functional verification of a design requires a “single instance” database, or “global memory.” This means that the dataset of the chip design cannot be partitioned or segmented, and run on many blade servers, or on a cluster with many compute nodes and separate memories. The size of the chip design dictates the total amount of memory needed to execute a functional verification run, without the dataset being swapped out of main memory and back to a much slower hard disk or storage system. When memory capacity is too small, this “swapping” activity is a killer of system and application performance, significantly lengthening the total run time. The more memory in the system, the shorter the overall run time – and the sooner a working chip can be brought to market.
Dataram has provided EDA memory solutions to many industry leaders, including:
- Agere
- Altera
- AMD
- ATI
- Cadence
- Freescale Semiconductor
- Hitachi
- Infineon
- Intel
- LSI Logic
- NEC
- nVidia
- Philips
- SIS Technologies
- Synopsys
- TI
- Toshiba
- US Logic
- Xilinx
If your design workstation is from HP, Sun Microsystems, IBM, or Dell, or contains architecture from Intel or AMD, Dataram can provide the memory upgrades to speed your EDA design runs. One of our memory specialists can help you select the right memory upgrades for your workstations. Contact us for more information.
