Blaze DFM strengthens ties with TSMC
This announcement builds on the previously announced agreement for Blaze to join the TSMC DFM Compliance Initiative.
"We started working with Blaze at a very early stage," said Ed Wan, TSMC senior director of Design Service Marketing. "With Blaze MO, we see a good potential to reduce leakage and manufacturing variability."
The two companies have agreed to work together to enable and evaluate Blaze MO usage by TSMC customers. Blaze MO is the first electrical design for manufacturability product from Blaze DFM. It uses information about design intent (such as timing constraints) to drive a manufacturing-aware optimization of integrated circuit designs for reduced leakage power and variability.
"Working with TSMC is clearly an ideal situation for Blaze," said Jacob Jacobsson, Blaze CEO. "We are honored by the time and energy that TSMC has put into this project."
Working in conjunction with Blaze engineers, TSMC has developed 90nm and 65nm design kits for Blaze. These design kits include pre-qualified CD bias ranges, OPC directives and GDSII layer specifications for the TSMC-supported method of GDSII annotation. The TSMC Blaze enablement project also included the incorporation of Blaze MO annotations into the TSMC RET and mask data preparation flow.
"We worked diligently with TSMC to qualify the electrical and lithography impact of Blaze CD biasing decisions on the TSMC process," said Andrew Kahng, co-founder, CTO, and Chairman of Blaze DFM, Inc.
