3 June 2014

ANSYS and TowerJazz deliver power noise and reliability sign-off design kit

Engineering simulation software provider ANSYS Inc of Canonsburg, south of Pittsburgh, PA, USA and specialty foundry TowerJazz (which has fabrication plants at Tower Semiconductor Ltd in Migdal Haemek, Israel, and at its subsidiaries Jazz Semiconductor Inc in Newport Beach, CA, USA and TowerJazz Japan Ltd) have announced a collaboration to deliver comprehensive power noise and reliability sign-off flow for mutual customers. With increased use of analog and radio frequency (RF) integrated circuits (ICs) in a variety of electronic systems including consumer, automotive, medical and industrial applications, the ability to accurately predict the performance of these ICs prior to production has become a critical design challenge, say the firms.

Through the collaboration, ANSYS and TowerJazz have created a foundry-certified power noise analysis process design kit (PDK) that includes reference flow guidelines, collateral, example test cases and flow setup guidance to enable analog and RF designers to produce optimized integrated circuits more quickly and with confidence, minimizing cost and maximizing manufacturing yield, reckon the firms. The reference flow enables mutual customers to efficiently utilize ANSYS Totem and ANSYS PathFinder and facilitate the manufacturing of their products in accordance with TowerJazz’s process requirements. These tools are said to be essential, since voltage drop and specialized reliability checks such as electromigration (EM) and electrostatic discharge (ESD) simulations cannot be performed using Layout Versus Schematic (LVS), Design Rule Check (DRC) and extracted simulation tools.

“As the mixed-signal and analog content increase in various markets, a robust and foundry-certified power noise and reliability sign-off flow becomes critical,” says Aveek Sarkar, VP of product engineering and support at ANSYS’ subsidiary Apache Design. “By collaborating with TowerJazz, we are able to provide optimized tools and methodologies for joint customers to enable a clean design flow, higher yield and reduced field failures,” he adds.

“A close collaboration between TowerJazz and Apache on custom analog design kit development enables our customers to efficiently deliver more robust and reliable designs for next-generation electronic products,” says Ori Galzur, VP of VLSI design center at TowerJazz. “This design kit will enable our customers to use the industry's standard power, noise and reliability sign-off solution on our industry-leading technology.”

The ANSYS product portfolio is being showcased in booth #1413 at the Design Automation Conference (DAC 2014) in San Francisco (2-4 June). TowerJazz's reference design demo is being shown on 3 June in booth #1301.

Tags: TowerJazz SiGe EDA

Visit: www.towerjazz.com

Visit: www.ansys.com