Date: 30/05/2012

20 nm fill solutions from Mentor Graphics and GLOBALFOUNDRIES collaboration

Mentor Graphics Corporation has announced that GLOBALFOUNDRIES would use the SmartFill facilities of the Calibre YieldEnhancer product to enable advanced fill techniques for 20nm manufacturing processes. The multi-layer fill analysis and cell-based fill generation capabilities of the SmartFill system help designers deal with complex fill interactions at advanced nodes with minimal impact on circuit performance. Calibre SmartFill reduces post-fill GDS database size and delivers faster runtimes compared to traditional dummy fill.

Calibre SmartFill allows designers to meet IC fill constraints in a single pass without manual customization or modification, further reducing tape-out cycle times with the help of the design kit provided by GLOBALFOUNDRIES.

"At 20nm the fill strategy becomes much more sophisticated because it's no longer just about planarity," said Maq Mannan, director of PDK development at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. "Besides CMP-ECD issues, you have to consider a whole range of interrelated effects, such as etch, lithography, stress, rapid thermal annealing (RTA) and other issues essential to successful manufacturing. Calibre's integrated fill analysis and cell-based approach makes fill more precise, while achieving target runtime and output file size."

GLOBALFOUNDRIES' 20nm-LPM technology is a comprehensive platform, delivering up to 40% performance improvement and twice the gate density of 28nm. The company's Fab 8 in New York began running full-loop 20nm silicon in January, and silicon delivery is expected in 2H 2012.

Advanced capabilities such as multi-layer fill shapes and user-defined fill cells are provided by the Calibre SmartFill solution, which are automatically inserted into a layout based on analysis of the design. It also supports continuous, multi-dimensional functions in place of linear pass-fail conditions, resulting in finer resolution of complex fill algorithms that cannot be performed with single-dimension design rules alone. This allows customers to simultaneously optimize for multiple factors such as density and perimeter.

The SmartFill enables timing-aware fill with back annotation of fill shapes into all design databases to support final timing verification. The SmartFill product also allows customers to define a list of critical nets that require special treatment during the fill procedure.

"Precise fill capability is rapidly becoming one of the most critical aspects of design for manufacturing at advanced nodes, and designers need more sophisticated tools to make sure that fill is optimized to meet multiple requirements," said Jean-Marie Brunet, director of product marketing for Calibre DFM at Mentor Graphics. "The combination of GLOBALFOUNDRIES design kits and the Calibre SmartFill product gives designers a solution that creates the exact amount, shape and location of fill, not only to ensure that layouts meet complex manufacturing requirements, but also to maintain their design intent."