IC layouts go through extensive design rule checking to ensure correctness, before being accepted for fabrication at a foundry or IDM. There’s something called the antenna effect that happens during chip manufacturing where plasma-induced damage (PID) can lower the reliability of MOSFET devices. Layout designers run Design… Read More
Who first came up with this term shift-left ? I’d assumed Siemens EDA as they use it so widely. But their latest white paper on the productivity improvements possible with shift-left Calibre IC verification flows puts the record straight: a software engineer called Larry Smith bagged the naming rights in a 2001 paper (leapfrogging… Read More
The Siemens Calibre group was very busy last week at SPIE. Calling Calibre industry leading really is an understatement. Calibre is one of the reasons Moore’s Law has continued to this day. This tool is legendary. You can get more information on the Calibre landing page including product information, resource guide, blogs
IC reliability is an issue that circuit design engineers and reliability engineers are concerned about, because physical effects like high Current Density (CD) in interconnect layers, or high point-to-point (P2P) resistance on device interconnect can impact reliability, timing or Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) robustness.… Read More
My first transistor-level IC design job was with Intel, doing DRAM designs by shrinking the layout to a smaller process node, and it also required running lots of SPICE runs with manually extracted parasitics to verify that everything was operating OK, meeting the access time specifications and power requirements across PVT … Read More
Physical verification is an important and necessary step in the process to tapeout an IC design, and the foundries define sign-off qualification steps for:
This sounds quite reasonable until you actually go through the steps only to discover that some of the … Read More
There are a few dozen causes of semiconductor failure. Most can be lumped into one of three categories: material defects, process or workmanship issues, or environmental or operational overstress. Even when all those causes are carefully mitigated, one factor is limiting reliability more as geometries shrink – and it… Read More
As semiconductors become more integrated into our lives reliability is becoming a critical issue. As IP consumes more of our die, IP reliability is becoming a critical issue. As we pack more transistors into a chip, reliability is becoming a critical issue. As we move from 28nm to 20nm to 16nm, reliability is becoming a critical … Read More
With multiple functionalities added into a single chip, be it a SoC or an ASIC, maintaining low power consumption has become critical for any design. Various techniques at the technology as well as design level are employed to accomplish the low power target. These include thinner oxides in transistors, different sections of … Read More
IC designers involved with physical design are familiar with acronyms like DRC (Design Rule Check), LVS (Layout Versus Schematic) and DFM (Design For Manufacturing), but how would you go about checking for compliance with ESD (Electro Static Discharge) rules? You may be able to kludge something together with your DRC tool and… Read More
