The Microcircuit Emulation Center At SRI International Princeton Selects Silvaco’s Invar Power Integrity Signoff Tool
Early Identification of Power, IR Drop, EM and Thermal Issues Avoids Costly Silicon Failures
Santa Clara, California – May 31, 2016 – Silvaco, Inc. today announced that the Microcircuit Emulation Center (MEC) at SRI International Princeton, has selected the InVar suite of power integrity tools for power, IR drop, and thermal analysis to ensure robust design layouts of analog, digital and memory circuits. Early analysis flags potential issues that can be resolved prior to tape out, avoiding failures that might otherwise appear after fabrication and result in silicon re-spins.
InVar patented concurrent analysis of power, IR drop, EM and thermal makes it possible to perform real- time analysis considering the effect of heat generation on the design, and provides coherent results quickly with a high degree of accuracy. The InVar power integrity tools include:
- InVar Power: Analyzes dynamic power consumption
- InVar EM/IR: Analyzes voltage drops and EM susceptibility in power sources and signal networks
- InVar Thermal: Performs thermal analysis at the block-chip- system level
The MEC at SRI International supports the emulation programs with design, fabrication and test of integrated circuits (ICs) to support the nation’s weapon systems. The MEC adopted InVar for initial use on designs employing their in-house BiCMOS, Analog and CMOS SRAM technologies. InVar complements the Silvaco design tool flow already in use, comprising of Gateway schematic capture, Expert layout editor, SmartSpice circuit simulator, Guardian DRC/LVS verification, Hipex RC extractor, Spider place and route, and Silos Verilog simulator.
“InVar offers valuable design insight that traditional SPICE simulations cannot,” said Milton Diaz, Program Manager at SRI International. “InVar’s Thermal, Power and IR drop analysis gives us a quantitative measure to the robustness of the physical layout and additional confidence in the reliability of the design. The enhanced accuracy it provides has already highlighted areas of improvement. We are now planning to apply this capability to other available technologies in the Emulation Programs at SRI.”
“Power integrity issues must be addressed as early in the design cycle as possible, to avoid expensive design and silicon iterations,” said David Dutton, Silvaco CEO. “InVar, and our new InVar Prime which requires only a design layout, enable engineers to understand potential pitfalls and eliminate them prior to fabrication.”
About Silvaco, Inc.
Silvaco, Inc. is a leading EDA provider of software tools used for process and device development and for analog/mixed-signal, power IC and memory design. Silvaco delivers a full TCAD-to-signoff flow for vertical markets including: displays, power electronics, optical devices, radiation and soft error reliability and advanced CMOS process and IP development. For over 30 years, Silvaco has enabled its customers to bring superior products to market at reduced cost and in the shortest time. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and has a global presence with offices located in North America, Europe, Japan and Asia.
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