3 September 2013

Pure foundry AWSC opts for Mentor Graphics’ Calibre for verification of GaAs Wireless ICs

Mentor Graphics Corp of Wilsonville, OR, USA says that Advanced Wireless Semiconductor Company (AWSC) has selected its Calibre nmDRC and nmLVS products as their golden signoff physical verification solution for gallium arsenide (GaAs) ICs for mobile and other wireless applications. AWSC is a pure foundry service located in Hsin-shi, Taiwan, which specializes in fabbing Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMIC) fabricated with GaAs HBT, pHEMT/IPD and GaAs/Ge CPV processes.

As part of their foundry offering, AWSC will provide the Calibre design rule decks to its customers to help ensure that their designs are error free and meet all foundry requirements before submitting them to AWSC manufacturing.

“We moved to Calibre for our new offerings to take advantage of its highly efficient commands and unique capabilities not available in other products, such as equation-based DRC, which makes it easier to implement complex design rules for RF applications,” said Louis Lu, manager of product development engineering at AWSC. “Calibre is widely used by our fastest growing customers, and it works seamlessly in any of the design flows our customers use, including the Agilent ADS custom RF design platform. Also very important in our decision is the high level of product support and application knowledge we receive from Mentor.”

“We’re pleased to see the adoption of Calibre for state-of-the-art RF ICs such as those fabricated by AWSC,” said Shu-Wen Chang, director of Calibre Foundry Programs at Mentor Graphics. “AWSC’s adoption of Calibre for advanced GaAs ICs for RF applications is part of a growing worldwide trend to use the most advanced Calibre technologies for larger feature size applications. Our mutual customers are pushing much more complex designs through processes initially developed for simpler geometric data, particularly in mobile applications (e.g. smart phones, tablets, etc.) where AMS/RF processes are increasingly important.”

One example of advanced features being used by AWS is the Calibre nmDRC product’s equation-based DRC (eqDRC) facility, which fills the void between traditional DRC and DFM process simulators, says the firm. Some design rules are simply too complex to capture with traditional DRC measurements and rule tables. Equation-based DRC allows these rules to be expressed as complex multi-variable equations, enabling precise and accurate characterizations of complex 2D and 3D interactions that have a direct impact on manufacturability. Equation-based DRC brings user extensibility and fast runtimes to a whole host of new design and process interactions. It also provides precise numerical feedback allowing users to make reliable design tradeoffs, and to quickly determine the best fix.

Tags: Mentor Graphics AWSC GaAs MMIC

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