Epic unveiling IC reliability tool

Electronic News, May 22, 1995

SANTA CLARA, CALIF. - EPIC Design Technology this week is introducing RailMill, an IC reliability analysis tool to detect electromigration and voltage drop problems before silicon is produced.

Running on Unix platforms, RailMill will be available in this quarter. Pricing starts at $133,000.

Targeted at deep-submicron custom IC, structured custom IC and ASIC design, RailMill analyzes current and voltage behavior from simulation and indicates where local current density or voltage drop is likely to cause failure and reduce product life time. Previously, electromigration and voltage drop analysis methods required expensive equipment and labor-intensive measurements performed after device fabrication, EPIC said. RailMill brings this detection step forward, into the design phase, eliminating silicon turns and reducing expensive and time-consuming post-silicon analysis.

"RailMill is a major breakthrough based on our power analysis strength, and three new additional pieces of technology," said Sang Wang, EPIC'S chairman and CEO. "What's so significant is that it enables designers to eliminate two major sources of reliability failures in the design phase, dramatically cutting the cost impact of these types of problems."

RailMill identifies electromigration violations so that designs can be modified to eliminate early device failures; identifies excessive voltage drops in the power nets that would cause reduced performance or intermittent signal failures; displays power distribution so that designers can adjust floor plans for balance; and enables what-if analysis to try out solutions for electromigration and voltage drop problems, according to EPIC.

OKI in Japan served as a beta site for RailMill, which was used to analyze a failed ASIC design. "As a beta-site partner with EPIC, we had an immediate case with voltage-drop problems for them to work on," said Mr. Shidei, manager of OKI's Systems LSI department. "Without RailMill, it took us six months to find the problem, because it was designed by our customer. We were very impressed when RailMill took only three weeks to identify exactly the same failure. This type of capability is essential for us to ensure that we manufacture reliable ICs to our customers."

Mr. Kikuchihara, assistant manager of the Systems LSI department, added: "Voltage-drop problems are very hard to isolate. In the past, we had to use ad-hoc approaches that include an electron-beam measurement, which is very, expensive and error prone. We believe that the analysis capability linked to their graphical display, will play a key role in finding and solving reliability problems. We absolutely intend to make this part of our design flow."