Thursday, June 2, 2011

ST joins Si2 industry standards efforts

DAC 2011, AUSTIN, USA: The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) announced that STMicroelectronics, a global leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications with innovative semiconductor solutions, has joined the Design for Manufacturability Coalition (DFMC).

Since 2010, ST has been a member of the SI2 OpenPDK Coalition and has donated important technologies to accelerate the goals of the Coalition.

“STMicroelectronics has a long history participating in Si2’s standards efforts. The new OpenPDK Coalition and the DFMC are important to our business, and we expect to see significant return on our investment in these efforts,” says Philippe Magarshack, Group VP, Technology Research and Development STMicroelectronics. “The standards being developed in these two groups will make it easier for us to concentrate on what we do best – innovation and creation of an outstanding broad product portfolio.”

The goal of the OpenPDK Coalition is to define a set of open standards to establish a PDK structure that will be as portable across foundries and as agnostic to EDA tools as possible. The OpenPDK from Si2 will enable greater efficiency in PDK development, verification and delivery and will provide equivalent support to all foundries, all EDA tool vendors, all IP providers, and all end users. The OpenPDK project aims to support all process nodes including advanced digital, high-voltage, and high speed analog processes.

One of the outputs of the OpenPDK Coalition is the Open Process Specification (OPS) that is a standard grammar of an electronic document that will contain all the objects needed to generate a complete PDK. All information needed by a PDK developer will be defined in that document with a normalized syntax that will allow more automation for PDK development and validation.

Last year, STMicroelectronics contributed to the coalition with a working model methodology (UML description of a starting set of OPS objects) and a first draft of the OPS description. This year STMicroelectronics has donated important technology to the OpenPDK effort. The technology consists of a 58 page example Design Rule Manual 45nm (based on a 45nm process), its associated OPS.xsd (XML Schema/grammar) and the electronic PDK Specification: OPS.xml. This DRM (pdf & xml releases) are an illustration of the OPS implementation and will be used to show how a PDK can be generated from this standard electronic document.

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.

Membership in the OpenPDK and DFMC Coalitions are open to all interested parties across the semiconductor supply chain.

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