GLOBALFOUNDRIES unveils 28nm analog/mixed signal production design flow development kit

MILPITAS, USA: At today’s inaugural Global Technology Conference, GLOBALFOUNDRIES showcased the industry’s first open-access 28nm Analog/Mixed-Signal (AMS) production design flow development kit.

The company is making the flow available to customers as a platform to build upon proven foundry methodologies and enable successful design. GLOBALFOUNDRIES has teamed with Cadence Design Systems to deliver this AMS production design flow.

“Collaboration and openness have never been more essential to enabling innovation at advanced technology nodes,” said Richard Trihy, director of design methodology at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “We are working closely with our ecosystem partners to deliver optimized design solutions. Customers can build on the leading-edge 28nm production design flow platform we’ve developed with Cadence to differentiate their designs and product offerings.”

The AMS flow is designed to emphasize the advanced features of GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 28nm Gate First High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) technology. The flow includes silicon-driven guidelines and recommendations for better manufacturability. Customers will have access to IP, libraries, reference kits and foundry collateral, which will allow them to recreate the design and flow to meet their individual design specifications.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES also will be the first in the industry to support a flow with DRC+, GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ silicon-validated solution that goes beyond standard Design Rule Checking (DRC) and uses two-dimensional shape-based pattern-matching to enable a 100-fold speed improvement in identifying complex manufacturing issues without sacrificing accuracy.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES has joined with Cadence to deliver the major elements of the AMS production design flow in Q3, 2010, with all of the flow steps supported by the GLOBALFOUNDRIES PDK. The reference flow contains PCells that enable critical advanced features within Cadence Virtuoso custom design tools. The complete production-level AMS flow is expected to be released to customers in Q4 2010, with silicon validation scheduled for early 2011.

“Cadence continues to be the ecosystem partner of choice for aggressive development projects that have a very tangible and positive productivity impact for companies working at advanced nodes,” said David Desharnais, product management group director at Cadence. “Our collaboration with GLOBALFOUNDRIES on this 28nm fully-integrated, open-access AMS production flow provides the industry with a deterministic path to Silicon Realization, one of the key foundational components of the EDA360 vision.”

The flow encompasses analog block design and mixed signal design, demonstrating mixed analog and digital design with GLOBALFOUNDRIES PDKs and partner standard cell libraries. All aspects of the design are covered in the reference flow including managing parasitic concerns, rapid circuit layout prototyping, analog layout guidelines and routing, simulation (e.g., choice of corners, Monte Carlo), inductor synthesis, metal fill and EM/IR analysis.

The design flow is also augmented with whitepapers and collateral on common challenges and GLOBALFOUNDRIES-recommended solutions. In addition, the flow incorporates top-level physical signoff steps for manufacturing using GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm requirements for DRC, lithography simulation and CMP.