Mentor Graphics announces comprehensive design enablement platform for Samsung’s 14nm IC manufacturing process

USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. has announced comprehensive design, manufacturing, and post tapeout enabling support for Samsung’s 14nm IC manufacturing processes, providing customers with a complete design-to-silicon flow concurrent with early process availability.

The fully interoperable Mentor flow helps customers achieve fast design cycles and first time silicon success.

The Mentor solutions optimized for Samsung’s 14nm offerings include the Calibre platform with design rule checking (DRC), LVS checking, extraction, design for manufacturing (DFM) and advanced fill, as well as the Tessent design for test (DFT) suite and yield analysis tools.

“Samsung and Mentor have been working together to speed the enablement of design and manufacturing co-optimization for many years, and our collaboration is more important than ever at the 14nm node,” said Dr. Kyu-Myung Choi, senior VP of System LSI infrastructure design center, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics.

“The design rules for 14nm are extremely complex with the introduction of FinFETs in addition to double patterning (DP) layers. It is critical that physical design, verification and testing tools are intimately aligned with the manufacturing processes of the target foundry. Since Samsung also uses the Mentor Calibre solution for its own IC development, designers using it will get accurate and immediate feedback so they can co-optimize the design process.”

The Calibre platform creates decomposed double patterning (DP) layouts that are compliant with all of Samsung’s 14nm lithography requirements and tuned to the Samsung mask synthesis and OPC process, which is also provided by Mentor at 14nm. It also provides designers with rapid feedback on complex design rules for FinFETs, and specific coaching on elimination of DFM litho errors to make fixing violations faster and more accurate.

Calibre tools for LVS and extraction have been calibrated to ensure accurate device and parasitic models for Samsung FinFETs, eliminating “double-counting” of important effects that can occur with other tools. Moreover, Calibre SmartFill ensures there are no CMP issues with designs by intelligently placing fill structures to achieve planarity while minimizing timing issues.

Collaboration on Tessent cell-aware test tools is providing higher test quality for new cell internal structures at 14nm, and higher test pattern compression to control the cost of testing larger 14nm designs. Mentor and Samsung are also leveraging production test diagnosis by exchanging information between the Tessent tools and the Calibre Pattern Matching facility to quickly identify and eliminate design-specific yield limiting features during design ramp up.

“Through our close cooperation, Mentor and Samsung are able to provide all the necessary enabling technology for our customers concurrent with the availability of Samsung’s 14nm manufacturing processes,” said Joseph Sawicki, VP and GM of the Design to Silicon division at Mentor Graphics. “This level of collaboration is absolutely necessary to deliver a 14nm-ready design ecosystem.”