Mentor Graphics customers expand use of Calibre Pattern Matching

Calibre Pattern Matching technology supplements multi-operational text-based design rules with an automated visual geometry capture and compare process. This visual approach is both very powerful in its ability to capture complex pattern relationships, and to work within mixed tool flows, making it much easier for Mentor customers to create new applications to solve difficult problems. Because it is integrated into the Calibre nmPlatform toolset, the Calibre Pattern Matching functionality can leverage the industry-leading performance and accuracy of all Calibre tools and flows to create new opportunities for design-rule checking (DRC), reliability checking, DFM, yield enhancement, and failure analysis.

“Our customers count on eSilicon’s design services, IP, and ecosystem management to help them succeed in delivering market-leading ICs,” said Deepak Sabharwal, general manager, IP products & services at eSilicon. “We use Calibre Pattern Matching to create and apply a Calibre-based yield-detractor design kit that helps identify and eliminate design patterns that impact production ramp-up time.”

Since its introduction, use models for Calibre Pattern Matching technology have rapidly expanded, solving problems that were previously too complex or time-consuming to be implemented. New use cases include the following:

• Physical verification of IC designs with curved structures—for analog, high-power, RF and microelectromechanical (MEMS) circuitry—is extremely difficult with products designed to work with rectilinear design data. Calibre customers are automating that verification using a combination of Calibre Pattern Matching technology and other Calibre tools for much greater efficiency and accuracy, especially when compared to manual techniques.

• Calibre Pattern Matching technology can be used to quickly locate and remove design patterns that are known or suspected of being difficult to manufacture (“yield detractors”). Foundries or design companies create libraries of yield detractor patterns that are specific to a process node or a particular design methodology. Samsung Foundry used this approach in its Closed-Loop DFM solution to help its customers ramp to volume faster, and reduce process-design variability.

• Some customers use Calibre Pattern Matching technology with Calibre Auto-Waivers functionality to define a specific context for waiving a DRC violation. This enhancement allows for automatic filtering of those violations for significant time savings and improved design quality.

“To help our customers create manufacturing-ready designs, we use Calibre Pattern Matching to create and use a yield detractor database to fix most of the litho hotspots in the block level. Then we perform fast signoff DFM litho checking at the chip level using an integrated solution with Calibre Pattern Matching and Calibre LFD” said Min-Hwa Chi, senior vice president, SMIC. “By offering a solution for manufacturability robustness that is built on the Calibre platform, we are seeing ready customer adoption of SMIC’s DFM solution.”

With the Calibre Pattern Matching tool, design companies can now optimise their physical verification checking to their unique design styles. The tool is easy to adopt because it doesn't rely on expertise in scripting languages. Instead, any engineer can readily define a visual pattern that captures the designer's expertise in the critical geometries and context for that configuration.

“With the growing adoption of Calibre Pattern Matching technology, Mentor continues to help our customers address increasing design complexity, regardless of the process node they are targeting,” said Joe Sawicki, vice president and general manager of the Design-to-Silicon division at Mentor Graphics. “By incorporating the Calibre Pattern Matching tool, the Calibre platform becomes an even more valuable bridge between design and manufacturing for the ecosystem.”

At the 2016 Design Automation Conference, Mentor has a Calibre Pattern Matching presentation on Tuesday, June 7 at 3PM in the Mentor booth #949. Register for the session using the registration form.