Technical contributions advance Si2’s OpenPDK coalition progress

AUSTIN, USA: The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) announced that since the Open Process Design Kit (OpenPDK) Coalition’s founding approximately one year ago, it has received essential technical contributions, as well as significant collaborations by the 16 member companies in its Working Groups, toward defining a truly open PDK structure for the industry. Process Design Kits (PDKs) are at the core of enabling custom/analog design, verification, and implementation, and are increasingly complex at advanced nodes, including 28 and 20 nanometer processes which are currently being qualified.

The goal of the OpenPDK Coalition is to define open standards for a universal PDK structure that will be portable across foundries and agnostic to EDA tools. 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 of the objects needed to automatically generate a complete PDK in multiple vendor flows. All information needed by a PDK developer will be defined in that document with a normalized syntax that will allow streamlined 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 draft OPS description. As a demonstration of continued commitment, ST recently donated additional technology to the OpenPDK effort. The recent contribution from ST consists of a 58-page example Design Rule Manual targeting advanced node processes. This electronic design rule is an illustration of practical application of OPS implementation and will be used to show how a PDK can be simply generated from this standard electronic document.

“Cadence believes that the contributions by STMicroelectronics towards the Open Process Specification will have a significant impact in realizing a truly open standard for PDKs,” says Ken Potts, director of Product Marketing, Silicon Realization. “This aligns with the EDA360 vision that we put forth to the industry, and Cadence is committed to supporting this new standard in our PDK tools, which will allow our customers to focus on the design problem, not format semantics.”

Another important technical contribution has come from SpringSoft. Their contribution of 21 Analog Symbols serves to augment the existing Si2 Symbol Library. The Si2 Symbol Library is a collection of 63 schematic symbols of circuit primitives for analog design, represented as OpenAccess databases. The primitives include capacitors, resistors, inductors, diodes, bipolar and MOS transistors, pads, transformers, varactors, fuses, and GND and VDD supplies. This set of symbols is used very widely in the analog design industry. The Si2 Symbol Library is available for download.

The SpringSoft contribution is important because their symbols represent meta functions used to enable simulation of IP (e.g. voltage sources, current sources, voltage controlled current sources, etc.). Si2 and the OpenPDK coalition are actively soliciting additional symbol donations to further expand the available library.

“The original Analog Symbol Library went a long way to facilitate and enable the adoption of OpenAccess. By expanding and standardizing the library we are not just avoiding a lot of redundant work but improving the interoperability schematics across the design flow, “ said Rich Morse Marketing and EDA Alliances manager, SpringSoft. “The more comprehensive the library is, the more useful and interoperable it becomes. Symbols are not a competitive technology and are ripe for standardization.”