Magma’s Quartz DRC Physical Verification Solution Qualified to Support GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ DRC+ Flow for Technologies at 28 nm and Below

The new capability will allow Magma’s and GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ mutual customers to significantly accelerate – up to 3 to 4 orders of magnitude – the identification of 2-dimensional (2D) yield detractors and complex manufacturing issues with comparable accuracy to full-chip lithography process simulations. Tight integration of Quartz DRC with Magma’s Talus® RTL-to-GDSII platform fully automates fixing and enables fast and easy deployment of an efficient and convergent analyze-and-repair methodology.

At 28 nm and below, certain patterns that reduce semiconductor yield are difficult to describe in process rules and are typically addressed using time-consuming and costly lithography process simulations. The pattern matching approach offers a faster, cheaper and comparably accurate alternative. Magma’s pattern matching solution leverages the tight integration of the Talus RTL-to-GDSII platform and the superfast Quartz DRC physical verification products to accelerate and automate the process. Using GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ DRC+ pattern database, Quartz DRC’s pattern matching engine locates the yield-critical patterns and then Talus automatically fixes the problematic patterns using its efficient routing engine. The Quartz DRC pattern-matching capability features a flexible user interface based on Tcl 8.5, making it easy to add new problematic patterns to the library. The pattern-matching engine is fully integrated within Magma’s existing Quartz DRC and Talus qDRC flow making it is very easy for existing users to adopt.

“Because Magma is one of our closest EDA partners, we were able to engage early on with their development team on this important technology,” said Luigi Capodieci, director of DFM/CAD and R&D Fellow at GLOBALFOUNDRIES. “This tight collaboration has resulted in a fast, efficient DRC+ search-and-repair capability that Quartz DRC and Talus users will be able to use to optimize yields on ICs manufactured in our 28-nm, low-power process technology and beyond.”

“Linearly scalable across multiple CPUs, Quartz DRC provides an order-of-magnitude improvement in runtime,” said Jacob Avidan, general manager of Magma’s Digital Sign-Off Business Unit. “With the addition of this GLOBALFOUNDRIES-qualified DRC+ pattern-matching capability, Quartz DRC users can further accelerate the flow without investing in new tools.”