Ensuring Your Power And Ground Nets Are Correctly Connected


In most chip designs, the power and ground nets are likely your largest and most important nets. If any devices are not properly connected, then you cannot expect them to function as expected. Amongst the many problems that can occur to power and ground involves the connections to the well areas of your design that power all the bulk connections to your devices. Well regions connectivity is oft... » read more

Fast, Focused Early-Stage Circuit Verification Can Get You To Signoff Faster


Designers everywhere know that with the increasing complexity of integrated circuits (ICs), meeting tapeout schedules has become increasingly difficult. While there are often many reasons for missing tapeouts, one critical component is the significant amount of time needed to run the signoff layout verification cycle, which contributes to overall signoff process duration. Much of this schedule ... » read more

Meeting Today’s Challenges For LVS


At least one thing is for certain in semiconductor development: bigger and more complex designs put lots of pressure on electronic design automation (EDA) tools and methodologies. Yesterday’s chip is today’s IP block, and entire racks of electronics are being packed into system-on-chip (SoC) devices. EDA tools must evolve constantly in order to keep pace with size and complexity while meeti... » read more

Improving Design Collaboration In The Age Of Remote Work


Teams of analog and mixed signal (AMS) design and layout engineers spend countless hours extracting every ounce of performance out of their design. They continually make incremental changes daily to the design until the very end, as close to tape out as possible. Each change made to the design requires corresponding changes to the circuit layout. As technology advances, accounting for the paras... » read more

Optimize Physical Verification Cost Of Ownership


As semiconductor designs continue to grow in size and complexity, they put increasing pressure on every stage of the design process. Physical verification, often on the critical path to tape-out, is especially affected. Design rule checking (DRC), layout versus schematic (LVS), and other physical verification runs take longer as chip size increases. In addition, finer geometries introduce new c... » read more

Innovative Strategies Are Improving Early Design Circuit Verification


Layout vs. schematic (LVS) circuit verification is an essential stage in the integrated circuit (IC) design verification cycle. However, given today’s large design sizes, numerous hierarchies, and complex foundry decks, meeting planned tapeout deadlines in the quickest turnaround time (TAT) can be difficult. In an effort to minimize TAT, most design teams now use parallelized design flows, wh... » read more

Moving Beyond Geometries: Context-Aware Verification Improves Design Quality And Reliability


Context-aware checks integrate physical and electrical information to evaluate a wide range of design conditions, from advanced design rule compliance, to circuit and reliability verification, to design optimization and finishing. Automated context-aware checking provides designers with actionable results that improve both debugging efficiency and verification precision. Introduction Many p... » read more

Device Pin-Specific Property Extraction For Layout Simulation


As we work through the sub-20 nm design space, the interactions between and effects on devices that are near each other are becoming critical factors in achieving the desired electrical performance. Accurate extraction of device pin-specific properties for modelling these effects is essential to attaining design goals. LVS extraction challenges Layout vs. schematic (LVS) comparison tools prov... » read more