Magma joins Si2’s Design for Manufacturability Coalition

AUSTIN, USA: The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) announced that Magma Design Automation, a provider of chip design software, is the latest member of Si2’s Design for Manufacturability Coalition (DFMC).

Magma joins other key players in the semiconductor supply chain, including Cadence Design Systems, IBM, Intel, Mentor Graphics, STARC, Synopsys, Tela Innovations and Texas Instruments, as DFMC members.

On August 10 DFMC members unanimously approved a 60-day Intellectual Property review period for the first official release of the specification for OpenDFM, a high-level DRC language that can be translated into a variety of proprietary verification languages with no loss of accuracy or performance.

OpenDFM, scheduled for release later this year with rapid adoption expected by all major EDA vendors, silicon foundries, and end-user companies, describes the patterns for physical verification at a higher level than traditional DRC rules and recent tests indicate it has the potential to reduce the volume of DRC rules by 10X-20X.

The next release of OpenDFM will add rules for Lithography, Chemical Mechanical Planarization and Critical Area Analysis. OpenDFM provides a compact notation for the description of the patterns of physical verification rules that include conditional rules and ranges of acceptable values.

DFMC’s charter is to specify open standards for software interfaces between EDA software tools and manufacturing software. The specification includes standard terminology definitions, semantics and exchange formats for relevant manufacturing information. It also includes standard software application program interfaces (API) for models describing different manufacturing processes, yield mechanisms and circuit behaviors.

“The DFMC is producing important work for the industry and we are pleased to have all major EDA vendors united in this important effort,” said Steve Schulz, president and CEO of Si2. “Each member company has committed to work together and to produce an inclusive approach to involve all stakeholders to create an industry-wide solution.”

By joining DFMC, Magma continues to support the industry-wide initiative toward developing a common runset language. “With increasing design rule complexity and number of rules at 65 nm and below, physical verification can become a bottleneck in the delivery schedule,” said Anirudh Devgan, general manager of Magma’s Custom Design Business Unit.

“Our collaboration with other members of the DFMC to define the specification and ensure interoperability of Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS with OpenDFM demonstrates our commitment to providing designers with faster physical verification flows.”