Cadence DFM tools provide 'what you design is what you get'
Cadence has launched a set of design products and capabilities to support faster production of digital SoC designs. The new capabilities, included in advanced Cadence SoC and custom implementation solutions, are said to provide ‘what you design is what you get’ capabilities.
David Desharnais, product marketing group director for Cadence’s Encounter range, said: “We are seeing customers transition to smaller nodes, often skipping a node in the process – we even have one customer moving from 0.13µm to 45nm. All these companies are looking for help and guidance to achieve this. When we talk to them, they are worried about manufacturing variations at 45nm. On a 0.13µm process, silicon changes didn’t make that much difference; at 45nm, one little change can make all the difference.”
With the launch of the new tools, Cadence says it is going beyond ‘rules’ to model directly critical elements of the manufacturing process – such as lithography, chemical mechanical planarisation (CMP) and random variation. It is using these models to produce a manufacturing correct design through prevention, analysis and optimisation.
