Simplex suite works up a storm

Electronic News, May 27, 1996 by Judy Erkanat

San Jose, Calif.--It was with elemental excitement that Simplex Solutions, Inc. introduced Fire & Ice and Thunder & Lightning, its fully integrated suite of IC layout verification products targeted for signal and power compliance (SPC) of multi-million-transistor, deep-submicron chips. Simplex also announced a three-year tool purchase and cooperative technology development agreement incorporating the new product with MIPS Technologies, a subsidiary of Silicon Graphics, Inc.

Fire & Ice and Thunder & Lightning enable designers of complex ICs, ASICs and ASSPs (application-specific standard products) to easily adopt an SPC methodology to ensure working silicon prior to manufacturing.

"From an engineering point of view, this verification tool suite can be run by designers without a Ph.D.," said Kevin Walsh, VP of marketing at Simplex. "We are making deep submicron accessible by putting the physics under the hood. This is an engineering solution instead of a TCAD solution, allowing designers to adaptively look at interconnect and associate the correct capacitance and accuracy. From a full-chip perspective, this is pretty hot."

The Simplex tools perform full-chip, 3-D extraction on 4-million-transistor circuits in 24 hours.

"Deep-submicron technology requires new tools and methods that extend physical layout verification beyond simple geometric and circuit comparison checks," said Mr. Walsh. "Fire & Ice and Thunder & Lightning provide unparalleled capacity, speed and accuracy to give designers greater confidence that their chips will work correctly at tape-out. Our products complement the traditional tools and fit into emerging timing-driven methodologies developed to cope with clock speeds well above 100MHz."

Fire & Ice is a high-capacity, 3-D IC layout extraction tool which hierarchically extracts transistor and interconnect RC (resistance/capacitance) parasitics from a GDS-II layout file. The extractor features innovative new algorithms, interconnect modeling techniques, database structures and multiprocessing support to shorten typical runtimes of conventional extractors from several weeks down to 24 hours.

The product calculates 3-D interconnect capacitance (lumped C, coupled C and distributed RC) and resistance to within 5-10 percent of the results of measured silicon and those produced by Poisson field solvers. It performs 3-D interconnect analysis by a new striping algorithm that divides the chip into sections for parallel processing on several workstations. Fire & Ice applies a special halo context to calculate interconnect capacitance, extracting area, lateral and fringing capacitance in the presence of multiple surrounding bodies, thereby accounting for the near-body coupling effects in deep-submicron technology.

"The key to verifying deep-submicron designs with millions of transistors and multiple layers of metal is the way in which this huge volume of layout-dependent data is reduced and presented to the user," said Mr. Walsh. "We've taken the capacity and accuracy from TCAD tools and Poisson solvers and made it accessible to designers who don't have or want the technical expertise to deal with those tools. We've also tightly linked TCAD with ECAD tools to enable rapid identification and analysis of signal and power problems in a full-chip context."

Thunder & Lightning provide designers with high-capacity power grid, clock tree and signal integrity verification. Thunder performs dynamic analysis of multi-million-transistor chips, while Lightning performs full-chip grid and current density analysis. Together, they implement a chip-wide signal and power verification strategy.

Thunder takes transistor position information from Fire & Ice to identify the power grid tap points and uses driving vectors from Verilog (VCD) to determine the active power demands of the chip. It passes the instantaneous, transient and time averaged current information at the power grid tap points to Lightning for complete power grid verification, including IR drop for checking supply voltage degradation and current density for detecting electromigration and power/ground bounce conditions.

Fire & Ice feeds transistor and interconnect information to Thunder & Lightning for signal/clock skew compliance testing, coupling noise, and reliability analysis. Thunder & Lightning reduce physical interconnect information between drivers and receivers on the chip for accurate verification of the coupling between nets based on circuit vector activity.

Fire & Ice and Thunder & Lightning feature a full-chip display mode combining fast problem observation with the capability to scope in and make corrections.

Simplex' integrated SPC tool suite is available in September running on Unix workstations from Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, and in 4Q96, on IBM workstations. Pricing for the Simplex SPC suite starts at $150,000 U.S. list.

The MIPS cooperative development deal, under which MIPS will adopt Simplex' new SPC tools for physical verification of its next-generation microprocessors, is worth more than $1 million.