TSMC uses Magma’s Quartz DRC for physical verification of 28-nm product qualification vehicle test chip

BANGALORE, INDIA: Magma Design Automation Inc., a provider of chip design software, announced today that TSMC used Quartz DRC for physical verification of its 28-nanometer (nm) product qualification vehicle (PQV) test chip.

PQVs are representative of design data customers will use in production designs. By designing and manufacturing the PQV test chip, TSMC offers its customers greater confidence in achieving silicon success in its 28-nm processes.

TSMC selected Quartz DRC because it provides the turnaround time and capacity needed for 28-nm designs while meeting TSMC’s rigorous accuracy requirements. Quartz DRC efficiently handled the test chip’s massive volume of data. Quartz DRC provided sign-off accuracy on the design which contained blocks routed by Magma’s Talus® digital implementation platform.

“At 28 nm and below, design rule complexity explodes,” said Anirudh Devgan, general manager of Magma’s Custom Design Business Unit. “TSMC’s decision to use Magma’s physical verification software on this PQV is an important milestone validating Quartz DRC’s capacity and speed for leading-edge technologies.”

“TSMC maintains its market and technology leadership by being first to develop and validate the most advanced process technologies,” said S.T. Juang, senior director of Design Infrastructure Marketing at TSMC. “Quartz DRC’s turnaround time and ability to handle large amounts of data has allowed us to validate our 28-nm process quickly, allowing our customers to start using the process sooner.”

Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS
Magma’s Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS products are architected to process integrated circuit (IC) designs of any size, at any technology node, in the least amount of time. Magma's is the first truly scalable physical verification solution, able to provide turnaround time that is up to an order of magnitude faster than existing solutions while using existing compute resources.

The Quartz tools are fully compatible with third-party IC implementation flows and can read file formats used by traditional physical verification tools.