Silicon Clocks tapes out two chips using Ciranova PyCells

SANTA CLARA, USA: Ciranova, Inc. announced today that Silicon Clocks had successfully taped out two MEMS chips, implementing the company’s modular CMEMSTM (Standard CMOS + MEMS) process technology platform, using a process design kit (PDK) created in part using PyCell Studio.

“With CMEMSTM, we are bringing a monolithically integrated MEMS platform technology to market,” said Emmanuel Quevy, CTO of Silicon Clocks. “It was crucial for us to choose the most productive and interoperable building blocks for our flow. We chose PyCell Studio because PyCells are fully compatible with our in-house Virtuoso flow from Cadence Design Systems, and also interoperable with other tools our customers may use.

"The productivity and advanced geometric capability of Ciranova’s PyCell technology has dramatically lowered the cost and complexity of our efforts to create a standardized CMOS-MEMS design kit that integrates seamlessly with any CMOS PDK or design flow."

Historically, MEMS technologies have required boutique processing and complicated packaging strategies. Silicon Clocks’ innovative CMEMS technology enables developers to simultaneously integrate many mechanical devices directly on top of CMOS wafers using more standardized semiconductor fabrication techniques.

PyCells are an integral part of the PDK Silicon Clocks has created to support CMEMS.

“It took me close to two years to create our original MEMS cell code base. It took me under four months to replicate that using PyCells, including my learning curve, which was really short,” said David Bernstein, Device Engineer at Silicon Clocks. “The advanced PyCell API functions save a lot of time compared to other approaches.”

PyCell Studio is a complete development environment for creating interoperable OpenAccess PyCells. Available as a free download from http://www.ciranova.com, PyCell Studio has been downloaded by over 1000 users at 250 companies worldwide.