News Article
GLOBALFOUNDRIES announces design improvements for 32nm and below
Cadence and GLOBALFOUNDRIES significantly speed design for manufacturing signoff
Cadence Design Systems announced that it has teamed with GLOBALFOUNDRIES to dramatically reduce the turnaround time for design-for-manufacturing (DFM) signoff at 28 nanometres. The companies' technologies enable customers to find and fix potential lithography hotspot problems that could reduce yield or even threaten viability of complex chip designs headed for manufacturing. Using the Cadence "in-design" DFM technology to support the GLOBALFOUNDRIES DRC+ methodology, Rambus cited a 60 times speedup of DFM signoff.
"Cadence has been a pioneer in pattern-matching technology, and our long-time development partner for the GLOBALFOUNDRIES DRC+ flow," said Luigi Capodieci, fellow and director of DFM at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. "GLOBALFOUNDRIES offers the industry's first silicon-validated libraries of yield-critical patterns"”layout patterns that are known to fail on silicon, for technologies at 32 nanometres, 28 nanometres and below. We rely on Cadence pattern classification technology to classify yield detractors into pattern families based on pattern similarity, including inexact patterns, to maximize the efficiency of DRC+. The innovative DRC+ verification flow, with the full-power of the industry leading Cadence Pattern Search and Matching Analysis, has been successfully used on several 32- and 28-nanometer production IC designs."
Many of the world's leading technology companies, including Rambus, have successfully applied the in-design DRC+ flow using the silicon-validated 28-nanometer pattern library from GLOBALFOUNDRIES. The core of the DRC+ flow is the two-dimensional shape-based pattern matching, which offers significant speed improvements in error detection and fixing.
The Cadence Pattern Search and Matching Analysis are embedded in Cadence Litho Physical Analyzer, Cadence Physical Verification System and the unified Cadence Virtuoso custom/analogue and Encounter Digital Implementation System solutions. This offers designers the flexibility to leverage the in-design pattern matching and automatic fixing available in Encounter and Virtuoso, which correlates 100 percent with the signoff flow and has successfully been used on advanced node production chips.
"This was the first time we used the in-design approach to DFM, and the results were impressive," said Keith Windmiller, senior director of Design Technology at Rambus. "Our IP is at the forefront of advanced node design, so we enthusiastically embrace technology that reduces risk, reduces time-to-tapeout, and promotes silicon yield and predictability. Deployed with the GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28-nanometer DFM process, the Cadence in-design DRC+ solutions delivered up to 60 times faster DFM signoff than traditional methods, and essentially eliminated any significant issues at signoff. Based on those results, this is an approach we will continue to use in our advanced node designs."
"The Cadence in-design technology reflects our approach to Silicon Realization by moving traditional DFM steps into digital and custom implementation," said Wilbur Luo, group director, product marketing, Silicon Realization Group at Cadence. "This enables engineers to tackle potential manufacturing issues earlier in the chip development process--before these issues become serious, costly problems at the manufacturing stage."
