Key Takeaways
- Electrical verification is a critical bottleneck in IC design, with 86% of designs requiring respins due to flaws, leading to significant costs and delays.
- Traditional Electrical Rule Checking (ERC) struggles with increasing design complexity and rising transistor counts, resulting in a widening verification gap.
- Aniah's OneCheck® is a revolutionary static transistor-level ERC tool that automates verification processes and drastically reduces false positives.
In the complex world of IC design, electrical verification has emerged as a critical yet often overlooked bottleneck. Aniah’s upcoming webinar on December 4, 2025, titled “Electrical Verification: The Invisible Bottleneck in IC Design,” sheds light on this issue, introducing their groundbreaking OneCheck® solution. As IC designs grow exponentially per Moore’s Law, schematic size and complexity surges, making electrical errors inevitable. Traditional Electrical Rule Checking (ERC) struggles to keep pace, leading to a widening verification gap. The Wilson Research Group’s 2024 highlights that 86% of IC/ASIC designs require respins due to design flaws, costing millions in re-spins, mask sets, and delayed time-to-market. Late-stage bugs not only waste resources but also risk missing market windows, eroding competitive advantage.
Electrical Rule Checking (ERC) fundamentals involve ensuring designs comply with electrical constraints like connectivity, voltage compatibility, current limits, and biasing. It detects issues such as floating nodes, short-circuits, power-ground errors, and device overstress, validating electrical integrity pre-tape-out to boost reliability and yield. However, traditional methods fall short amid rising transistor counts, design complexity and stagnant verification resources, particularly in headcount for ERC engineers.
Aniah’s OneCheck® represents a paradigm shift: the first static transistor-level ERC tool for “right-on-first-silicon” ICs. Designed for adoption, users benefit from the automated PDK & power setup, fast run time, and advanced cross-probing with Cadence Virtuoso. Independent of foundry tech-files, it empowers designers and CAD teams with unprecedented error coverage, drastically reducing false positives – up to 150x in some cases via propagation path analysis and system-conditional checks. For mature and advanced nodes, it handles billion-transistor designs in minutes.
Breakthrough features include full-chip analysis, across all possible power combinations for a 100% reliable error detection. OneCheck® uniquely identifies errors like conditional HiZ, missing level shifters, bulk/diode leakages, floating gates/bulks/diodes, electrical overstress, and ESD gate-to-supply issues. Its pseudo-DC engine enumerates all DC states for formal proofing, verifying complex isolation on-the-fly and rejecting impossible conditions to minimize noise.
Integrated natively with Cadence Virtuoso, OneCheck® fits early in the flow from post-schematic netlist to full-chip bridging analog, digital, and mixed-signal domains. Users praise its simplicity: “Aniah lets designers achieve excellent design quality with minimum effort”. It “starts at check-and-save, converging to 100% quality by sign-off,” as noted by design managers and verification engineers.
Bottom line: By focusing on root causes, grouping thousands of errors into a limited number of root causes, OneCheck® accelerates debugging, enhances productivity, and cuts costs. Aniah emphasizes 100% error coverage and first-in-class support. In an industry where delays mean millions, adopting OneCheck® ensures zero electrical errors on first silicon spin, fostering confidence from design to tape-out.
Also Read:
Aniah and Electrical Rule Checking (ERC) #61DAC
Electrical Rule Checking and Exhaustive Classification of Errors
CEO Interview: Vincent Bligny of Aniah
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