Calibre RealTime: Placing Signoff Verification into the Custom Designer’s Hands


How to reduce custom/AMS design cycle time while improving design quality with on-demand, in-design, signoff-quality verification from Calibre RealTime. To download this white paper, click here. » read more

Keeping Pace With Moore’s Law


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As the number of transistors doubles with each move to a smaller manufacturing process technology, there are questions as to whether the current cadre of place and route tools will be able to keep in lock step. Have no fear, assured Saleem Haider, senior director of marketing for physical design and DFM at Synopsys. “For the increase in densities that we get with... » read more

Too Many Rules


By Ed Sperling The number of restrictive design rules that have to be dealt with by routers at 28nm and beyond has increased by several orders of magnitude compared with several generations ago, creating havoc in the automated tools world and slowing down the entire design process. At a time when market windows are shrinking, complexity is making it harder to meet even the old schedules. Th... » read more

DFM Challenges Abound Below 20nm


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As semiconductor design teams struggle to wring the last few percentage of die shrink from a technology node, much of the ability to do that rests on the EDA tools. From place and route through DFM checks—essentially, everything that happens before the design is sent to the fab or foundry—it all must be tightly integrated with the manufacturing process so it co... » read more

Increasing Levels Of Risk


Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sits down with Mentor Graphics' Jean-Marie Brunet to talk about double patterning, finFETs, design rules at advanced nodes and why design for manufacturing (DFM) has suddenly become so popular. [youtube vid=3GHvikyjZow] » read more

Why Do My DP Colors Keep Changing?


By David Abercrombie At 20nm, foundries are using several different double patterning design flows. One of the more common flows does not actually require the design team to decompose their layers into two colors. The designer only has to verify that the design can be decomposed before taping out each single layer. There are certain obvious advantages to this flow. For example, the designer do... » read more

Experts At The Table: Issues In Lithography


By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss future lithography challenges with Juan Rey, senior director of engineering at Mentor Graphics; Aki Fujimura, chairman and chief executive at D2S; and Tatsuo Enami, general manager for the sales division at Gigaphoton. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. (Part one can be found here.) SMD: Let’s re-vi... » read more

Challenges Of Physical Design Closure


By Jean-Marie Brunet A clear trend in IC design is that with each smaller process node, reaching design closure gets more difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Printing ever-smaller features with 193nm wavelength light has introduced unprecedented levels of manufacturing challenges, which are addressed with a growing set of complex design rules (DRC) and design for manufacturing (DFM) cons... » read more

More Design Rules Ahead


By Ed Sperling & Mark LaPedus For those companies that continue to push the limits of feature shrinkage, designs are about to become more difficult, far more expensive—and much more regulated. Two converging factors will force these changes. First, the limits of current 193nm immersion lithography mean companies now must double pattern at 20nm, and potentially quadruple pattern at 14n... » read more

Getting Ready For 20nm


By Ed Sperling and Mark Lapedus Despite hurdles in getting 28nm rolling and predictions that process technology will stick around for years to come, there appears to be rapidly growing interest in 20nm—at least from the design side. This is significant for a couple reasons. First, for most companies 20nm will be the first encounter with double patterning because EUV still is not viable—... » read more

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