Good news – we’re at IMS this year!
Are you an analog designer? If so, you know how sensitive high-frequency circuits can be to silicon substrate parasitics. You also know traditional extraction tools and flows aren’t really designed to find these types of parasitics. The result is that you’ve been saddled with stringent design constraints, when what you really need is a highly accurate and comprehensive analysis of their circuits, including a detailed analysis of the power and signal nets. Thanks for your order, please move to the pick-up window…
Of course, in the real world, providing a highly accurate and comprehensive parasitic extraction solution for silicon substrate parasitics is no simple task. Although field solver tools existed that could perform substrate extraction, their runtimes and lack of integration in established extraction flows resulted in limited and cumbersome manual use. Now, Coupling Wave Solutions (CWS) has developed a silicon substrate extraction engine that provides field solver accuracy with minimal impact on the complete extraction+simulation flow. Their SiPEX™ tool can read silicon substrate port geometry from the SVDB, run the parasitic extraction, and automatically back-annotate the PEX netlist.
Still one small wrinkle, though. In the interests of ease-of-use, practicality, and a complete extraction solution, CWS had to find some way to integrate the SiPEX functionality into existing extraction flows. They partnered with STMicroelectronics and Mentor to develop a solution, which resulted in a push-button integration between Mentor’s Calibre® xRC™ and Calibre xACT™ parasitic extraction tools, and the CWS SiPEX tool. The Calibre and SiPex tools work synergistically to provide designers a fast, complete, accurate circuit model that can help designers deliver better RF performance through an improved physical implementation with fewer silicon iterations.
If that interests you, we’ll be at the International Microwave Symposium discussing the tool integration, and how you can take advantage of it to perform accurate, comprehensive high-frequency simulation, Tuesday, June 6 – Thursday, June 8 at Hawaii Convention Center – Honolulu, HI. You can even find us at Booth 1914 and see daily joint presentations with CWS. Join us to learn how you can obtain field-solver accurate silicon substrate extraction for your RF designs!
