Design platform enables tapeout of gate-all-around transistor SoC

Building on numerous successful process and design enablement partnerships, this important milestone validates the readiness of GAA transistor architecture, the next-generation transistor technology to support the demands of advanced semiconductor designs.

Made possible through IC Compiler II's highly-extensible architecture and ability to efficiently absorb the challenges related to shrinking process geometries, this latest breakthrough further demonstrates IC Compiler II's status as the industry's preferred solution for advanced process node enablement.

"Samsung Foundry has achieved many industry firsts in our drive to deliver differentiated process technology offerings to our comprehensive customer base. The latest tapeout, our GAA test chip, provides further validation of our continued commitment," said Jaehong Park, Executive Vice President of Design Platform Development at Samsung Electronics. "The agile and fruitful collaboration, which has delivered this technical breakthrough, underscores Synopsys' position as one of the key industry innovators and trusted technology partners."

Emerging challenges at the leading edge of process scaling demands an enhanced inter-developmental working model between the EDA industry and the foundry. Optimising solutions to address complexities introduced by advanced process technology that include increased transistor densities and utilisation, design rules and routability, and growing variability, is paramount to achieving new node success.

Advanced extreme ultraviolet (EUV) manufacturing technology provides significant help in mitigating some of these complexities, however increasing layout-dependent effects and thus inter-cell dependencies have demanded greater innovation. Samsung Foundry's and Synopsys' work on high-utilisation routability and the associated patterning methodology has provided a strong platform that is key to ensuring the viability of this new node.

Additionally, multi-year enhancements in IC Compiler II that tightly couple the technologies that span the breadth of the placement, legalisation, and routing stages of the design flow have been key to Samsung Foundry achieving its overall logic-area shrink goals for this process.

A benefit of Samsung Foundry's GAA technology is the realisation of enhanced gate control and reduced internal transistor parasitics that together demand next-generation optimisation technologies to extract the process' combined power, performance, and area (PPA) potential.

Delivered through the continuous infusion of Synopsys' PrimeTime timing and StarRC parasitic-analysis technologies, IC Compiler II's signoff-correlated analysis engines augment its industry-leading, full-flow, total-power-driven optimisation framework, ensuring an accelerated and convergent path to targeted PPA.

Sassine Ghazi, Co-General Manager, Design Group at Synopsys, added: "Synopsys prides itself on its long history of enabling the most complex designs and also playing a lead role in enabling advanced processes to deliver the next generation of high-performance SoCs.

“Samsung Foundry has proven to be a visionary collaborator, and the deployment of IC Compiler II and the Synopsys Fusion Design Platform for this gate-all-around technology is a strong affirmation of our continued investments in highly-differentiated innovation as well as our partnership-driven approach to industry leadership."