Altis Semiconductor standardizes on Cadence MaskCompose Reticle and wafer synthesis suite

SAN JOSE, USA: Cadence Design Systems Inc. announced that Altis Semiconductor, a European specialty foundry, standardized on the Cadence MaskCompose Reticle and Wafer Synthesis Suite to simplify and speed the path to silicon manufacturing. Through its automation, MaskCompose helps enable seamless execution of multiple, critical steps in reticle and wafer synthesis, implementation, and documentation of data-intensive and expensive photomasks and wafer stepper layouts.

“Altis has improved operational excellence, boosted mask time to market and reduced manual documentation in critical mask-to-silicon production flows,” said Wilbur Luo, group director, product marketing, Silicon Realization Group at Cadence. “Whether your design is advanced node or a larger geometry, the automation built into the production-proven MaskCompose brings real productivity gains to Silicon Realization.”

MaskCompose delivers fast, consistently correct frame generation, wafer layout, fracture preparation, jobdeck generation, order forms, and customized paperwork. In its strategy to standardize and optimize the tapeout process, Altis decided to investigate commercial solutions available on the market. After an extensive evaluation, the foundry chose MaskCompose.

“The Cadence MaskCompose suite allows us to rapidly generate in a highly automated way reticles, optimized wafer maps, mask order forms and other necessary fab documentation for our customers’ designs,” said Karl Lange, VP, sales and marketing, Altis. “This new level of automation is tremendously improving the efficiency of our tapeout operation team and time-to-volume manufacturing for our customers.”

The comprehensive automation in MaskCompose minimizes the risks in mask-making thereby improving the production cycle time for standard, high-volume circuit designs as well as for multi-layer reticles (MLR) and multi-project reticles and wafers (MPW). Among other things, it provides a highly efficient and environment-independent design tapeout system, and automatic paperwork generation that boosts productivity and accuracy.

In addition to MaskCompose, Altis uses the Virtuoso unified custom/analog flow and has developed a complete SKILL-based process design kit (PDK) infrastructure for its production flow.