Date: 06/08/2010

TSMC employs Magma's physical verification software for its 28nm PQV test chip

Magma has announced that semiconductor fab service provider TSMC has used Magma's Quartz DRC for physical verification for its 28-nanometer (nm) product qualification vehicle (PQV) test chip. PQV consists of VLSI combo chips such as logic, memory and ASIC samples representing design data of fab customers, which is going to be used in production designs.

"At 28 nm and below, design rule complexity explodes," said Anirudh Devgan, general manager of Magma's Custom Design Business Unit. "TSMC's decision to use Magma's physical verification software on this PQV is an important milestone validating Quartz DRC's capacity and speed for leading-edge technologies."

S.T.Juang, senior director of Design Infrastructure Marketing at TSMC said "Quartz DRC's turnaround time and ability to handle large amounts of data has allowed us to validate our 28-nm process quickly, allowing our customers to start using the process sooner."

Magma says its Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS products are architected to process integrated circuit (IC) designs of any size, at any technology node, in the least amount of time. Magma claims Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS are the first truly scalable physical verification solutions able to provide turnaround time that is up to an order of magnitude faster than existing solutions while using existing compute resources.