Webinar: Simulate Trimming for Circuit Quality of Smart IC Design

Advanced semiconductor nanometer technology nodes, together with smart IC design applications enable today very complex and powerful systems for communication, automotive, data transmission, AI, IoT, medical, industry, energy harvesting, and many more.

However, more aggressive time-to-market and higher performance requirements force IC designers to look for advanced and seamless design flows with tools and methodologies to overcome these challenges. In this context for high-precision circuit applications, quality trimming is becoming a very important step before tape-out because the increased performance variation induced by process statistics cannot be reduced only at design level.

Most of today’s trimming applications are based on Monte Carlo Analysis to ensure that a trimming step is executed for each simulation sample. Unfortunately, most of the time this task requires custom scripts to setup the right sequence of multiple simulations and cannot be reliable for high-sigma robustness application (beyond 3 sigma) at long tail distributions. MunEDA provides an enhanced Dependent Test Feature for circuit trimming within its EDA design tool suite WiCkeD. This ensures for each simulation sample an easy-to-use and seamless trimming procedure as well as controlled switching of operating conditions, suitable for circuit verification, high-sigma robustness and circuit sizing/optimization.

In this webinar we’ll discuss typical applications of trimming methods, and will show how to set up sequences of multiple dependent simulations in MunEDA’s WiCkeD circuit sizing & verification tool suite. We’ll then discuss how process variation, local variation, temperature and Vdd variation, have to be treated differently for a correct analysis result. The measurements before trimming are usually taken at fixed operating conditions, whereas after trimming the circuit has to work at multiple operating conditions.

For documentation purposes, the performance variation with and without trimming has to be simulated. Simulation of the trimming procedure involves different methods of calculating trimming settings from initial measurement results. We’ll discuss ways to set up scripts, Verilog code or use simulator outputs to decide on trimming settings.

After setting up the simulation procedure, a typical analysis step is standard Monte Carlo. But since the simulation setup in MunEDA WiCkeD is general and not limited to Monte Carlo, it can run sensitivities, optimization, and high sigma robustness analysis with the trimmed circuit as well.

Especially the topic of parametric high-sigma analysis is interesting for post-trimming performance analysis, because the distribution shape of trimmed performance metrics often deviates significantly from the normal distribution.

Here is the REPLAY

The speaker is Michael Pronath. I have known Michael for many years and enjoy working with him. He has a PhD in Electronics and has been with MunEDA since the beginning. Today he is VP of Products and Solutions. With 20+ years of field experience Michael is an excellent speaker and worth listening to, absolutely.

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