Collaboration Provides Sub 65-nm Variation-Aware IC Design Flows

This week at the Design Automation Conference (DAC), Extreme DA and semiconductor foundry UMC announced their collaboration on variation-aware IC design flows for 65-nm and finer process technologies. Extreme DA specializes in IC performance and yield-improvement software. The jointly-developed design flows reduce uncertainty and predict performance and yield by analyzing timing behavior in the presence of process variations.

The first flow, based on extreme DA's Extreme Gold statistical analysis suite, has already been applied to a test chip at UMC’s 65-nm process node. The collaborative efforts are in the following areas:

• Characterization of UMC libraries for global and mismatch variations to analyze these effects
• Location-based on-chip variation (LOCV) model construction for improved accuracy of variation analysis
• Variation-aware extraction and timing analysis on a 65-nm test chip

Extreme DA
www.extreme-da.com

UMC
www.umc.com