What is 3Dblox?
If you have not heard of it before, 3Dblox is an emerging standard that was first created by TSMC but is now managed by IEEE who are in the process of turning it into open standard. It already has broad EDA, foundry and OSAT support and is being leveraged today across the ecosystem.
What is its goal?
As an open ecosystem cross collaboration format that will enable transparent collaboration between EDA tools.
3Dblox, a hardware description language, serves the procompetitive purpose of modularizing and streamlining the 3D IC package solutions available in the semiconductor industry, helping to enhance interoperability and unleash innovation for 3D IC designs. 3Dblox is also aimed at improving the current error-prone 3D IC design process, and saving time and cost by enabling different EDA tools to speak the same language and support chiplet design reuse features.
- Provides a uniform generic format that can be used by all EDA tools to describe the key physical stacking and the logical connectivity information in 3D IC designs, making tool interoperability across any supported tools, as well as integrating data from multiple parties into a comprehensive 3D IC design, a breeze.
- Modularize 3D IC structures to simplify the 3D IC design flow and enable EDA tools to be more efficient and user-friendly
Siemens EDA is an early adopter of 3Dblox and our Innovator3D IC Integrator technology, which is a 2.5/3D IC prototyping and pathfinding solution, can read, author, edit and write 3Dblox format across all three design abstraction levels.
You can find out more on Innovator3D IC Integrator here: Innovator3D IC solution suite | Siemens Software
What are 3Dblox abstraction levels? The abstraction level is how devices, such as ASICs or Chiplets are described/defined.
- Devices can be defined as a black box
- Devices can be defined as LEF/DEF
- Devices can be defined as GDSII
An example of early 3Dblox usage is described here: Siemens & ASE collaborate on 3Dblox workflows | Siemens
If you are interested to know more about 3Dblox, maybe even explore some examples then please visit this webpage: 3Dblox resources | Siemens Software
