White Papers 

This white paper discusses the major challenges with FinFETs and how TSMC has been collaborating with Synopsys, one of their ecosystem partners, to deliver a complete solution. Key elements of this solution include comprehensive FinFET profiling without impact to design tool runtime and proven, verified IP availability. The TSMC 16-nm FinFET solution will ensure mutual customers swiftly move to building the next generation SoCs.
Jason S.T. Chen, TSMC; Andy Biddle, Synopsys

This whitepaper presents the key concepts of DPT compliant design and demonstrates how new signoff technology in IC Validator makes it possible to ensure 20nm manufacturing compliance. Recognizing that the designer productivity necessary cannot be achieved alone by point-tool enhancements and post-processing techniques, the paper outlines advances in In-Design physical verification within IC Compiler.
Paul Friedberg, CAE, Synopsys; Stelios Diamantidis, Product Marketing, Synopsys

It has come to be broadly accepted in the semiconductor industry that short-channel effects severely limit bulk planar transistor performance, and alternative device structures will necessarily have to be adopted if we are to shrink process geometries below 20nm. This paper explores the two major contenders for the new transistor architecture: finFETs and fully depleted silicon-on-insulator.
Ron Duncan, Applications Engineering Manager, Synopsys; Marc Swinnen, Product Marketing Manager, Synopsys

This paper presents how in-design physical verification with IC Validator enables Automatic DRC Repair (ADR), a novel capability that makes it possible for designers to automatically detect, repair and revalidate signoff DRC violations with negligible physical or timing impact, all within IC Compiler.
Paul Friedberg, Staff CAE

With today’s increasingly complicated design flows, creating a snapshot of a design’s full mask set to run physical verification at intermediate points during the design cycle, or in-design, presents many challenges. This paper presents an optimal approach to creating a working snapshot of a design’s complete mask data set for the purposes of in-design physical verification with IC Validator, Synopsys’ award-winning physical verification platform for advanced nodes.
Rich Santilli, Staff CAE

Physical verification challenges of analog designs are different than the challenges of large digital designs. In addition to complex runset requirements, a tight interface to a parasitic extraction tool and an easy-to-use GUI are needed to use a runset effectively in an analog design environment. IC Validator, the latest generation physical verification tool, can be used to solve these issues. This paper addresses many of the physical verification requirements of analog designers and how they are met with IC Validator.
Al Blais, Global Technology Services

Smaller technologies, shorter time to market windows and more complex designs are driving the need for an additional set of analysis techniques which will help designers understand how susceptible their designs are to manufacturing process variations Technology nodes larger than 90 nm were able to achieve a certain level of manufacturability by complying with a set of foundry design rules.
Kuo H. Wu, PhD and Marilyn Adan

Physical verification runtimes and memory usage have exploded with the increasing number of design rules, their subsequent complexity and the size of chips to be verified.
Rahul Kapoor, Marilyn Adan, and Louis Schaffer

There is a growing need for a concurrent physical design and physical verification flow, also known as an in-design physical verification flow. This flow improves the overall turnaround time and ease of use of the physical verification process.
Elango Velayutham

Achieving correct-by-construction results during implementation significantly reduces time to tapeout and avoids schedule delays. This paper presents a pushbutton flow to generate timing-aware, signoff quality metal fill during place and route.
David Pemberton-Smith

To manage design violations, CAD departments have employed a number of solutions to reduce the amount of violations needed to be checked by the physical verification engineer. However, these solutions are limited.
Jason Puryear