Mentor releases optimized flow, new fill automation for GLOBALFOUNDRIES' 22FDX IC manufacturing process

WILSONVILLE, Ore., Oct. 9, 2018 -- Mentor, a Siemens business, today announced it has qualified complete solutions from its Calibre® nmPlatform™, Analog FastSPICE™ (AFS)™ Platform, Eldo® Platform and Nitro-SoC place and route system for GLOBALFOUNDRIES' 22FDX Fully-Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FD-SOI) integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing processes. GF and Mentor have mutually developed an advanced, first-of-its-kind automated fill flow that ensures analog devices are able to leverage the full performance of these new processes in emerging markets such as ADAS/autonomous driving, IoT, 5G communications, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

"Mentor is pleased to be taking another step in our longstanding relationship with GF to deliver to our mutual customers solutions that help develop industry innovations," said Ravi Subramanian, vice president and general manager, IC Verification Solutions, Mentor, a Siemens business. "The combined expertise of GF and Mentor gives designers the ability to develop innovative ICs for a broad number of applications."

"Mentor has an extremely long history of partnership with GF, as Calibre's first customer ever," said Richard Trihy, senior director, Design Enablement at GF. "That partnership continues today with not only additional design kit certifications, but flows that help accelerate design fill efforts at a time when market windows are increasingly shorter."

Mentor Calibre nmPlatform for GF's 22FDX

Mentor has made enhancements across its Calibre nmPlatform for GF's 22FDX process. One of the most significant of these is an industry-first, automated fill flow targeting both analog and radio frequency (RF) IP blocks and full chips. The new fill flow automates a task that previously required fabless design teams to manually develop custom scripts to perform fill effectively. The new flow combines Calibre PERC™, Calibre Pattern Matching and Calibre YieldEnhancer tool capabilities to create both net-aware and orientation-aware filling that results in consistent analog and RF performance independent of where the blocks are placed in the chip.

In addition, Mentor enhanced the Calibre nmDRC™ and Calibre nmLVS™ tools for GF's 22FDX process. Mentor worked with GF to ensure appropriate coverage, and the two companies are collaborating to continuously optimize the Calibre design kits for runtime performance. At the same time, GF and Mentor worked together to make advanced process requirements transparent to mutual customers within the Calibre design rule checking (DRC) and multi-patterning software.

The Calibre xACT^TM parasitic extraction tool is available for GF's 22FDX process, allowing customers to efficiently balance the needs of high accuracy of critical structures along with high performance required for full chip signoff.

The Calibre PERC reliability platform is a verification solution for both IP and full-chip reliability analysis. Point-to-point and ESD current density reliability checks are critical for today's complex, dense chip designs, but completing these checks on very large 22FDX designs requires scalability. GF and Mentor collaborated to enable a Calibre PERC solution leveraging a new multi-CPU run capability that allows mutual customers to more quickly find and resolve ESD reliability concerns in their designs.

The Calibre YieldEnhancer tool is certified for GF's 22FDX processes. Mentor and GF are also jointly delivering enhanced use models that optimize fill runtimes, minimize shape removal caused by an engineering change order (ECO), and ensure consistency across all layers, intellectual property (IP) blocks and full-chip system-on-chips (SoCs) using fill-as-you-go methodologies.

Mentor AFS Platform and Eldo Platform for GF's 22FDX

Mentor's AFS Platform and Eldo Platform are supported in the GF 22FDX process. Mutual customers benefit from the AFS Platform (delivering fast, SPICE-accurate verification for the largest nanometer-scale circuits), and Eldo Platform (circuit verification for analog-centric circuits) to verify their chips designed for GF technologies.

Mentor Nitro SoC for GF 22FDX

Mentor's Nitro SoC place and route system is certified for GF's 22FDX process. In addition to support for 22FDX process rules, Mentor enhanced the Nitro SoC core engines to meet the new architecture requirements and design rules for this process. This enables Mentor to deliver an optimized digital implementation flow for the 22FDX node.

To learn more about Mentor's 22FDX enablement offerings, please visit the Mentor booth at GTC Munich on October 12.

Mentor Graphics Corporation, a Siemens business, is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products, consulting services, and award-winning support for the world's most successful electronic, semiconductor, and systems companies. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777. Web site: http://www.mentor.com.