UMC And Integrand Partner On Advanced Capabilities For 0.13 Micron RF Designers

Hsinchu, Taiwan and Berkeley Heights, NJ -- UMC and Integrand Software, Inc. announced that their collaboration has resulted in the development of IC design resources for 0.13 micron RF designers. Through the partnership, UMC's Virtual Inductor Library (VIL) has new capabilities from Integrand tools. A new graphical user interface (GUI) tied to UMC's Foundry Design Kit (FDK) gives designers the means to create accurate designs in a shorter amount of time.

Integrand's EMX and EMX-Continuum tools, utilized in UMC's VIL, have been used for the synthesis of Spice models for a variety of spiral inductors, including Planar, Stacked and Symmetric inductors. Accuracy has been verified to be within a few percent of measurements for inductance, as well as for more sensitive parameters like the quality factor.

"We have been very happy to partner with and license our technology to UMC to provide greater capabilities to RFCMOS designers," said Dr. Sharad Kapur, president of Integrand Software, Inc. "Traditionally, scalable models have been provided by foundries only for active components. The EMX-Continuum software was used to create true parameterized, or scalable, models for UMC's spiral inductors. In addition, Integrand's Optimum Inductor Finder(TM) combined with UMC's FDK and VIL represent a unique solution to the inductor synthesis problem, previously thought intractable because of the large design space of passives."

Integrand's Optimum Inductor Finder, a GUI-based synthesis tool, is now deployed within the FDK to allow UMC customers to enter their desired inductance and make tradeoff decisions between Q and area. Designers may also request a specified "flatness" of inductance within a given frequency range for Ultra-Wideband (UWB) circuit designs. The seamless integration within the FDK allows for back annotation in order to drive UMC's Schematic Driven Layout. Furthermore, the Spice model parameters are geometric to allow EDA Layout Parasitic Extraction (LPE) tools to extract model parameters from a GDS database for post-layout simulation.

"Experiments within our lab have demonstrated the accuracy of these tools across different design spaces and over several wafers," said S. C. Chien, vice president of UMC's Central Research and Development division. "Planar, Stacked and Symmetric inductors were used in the study and accuracy was confirmed in both the pre- and post- de-embedding of probe structures. These positive results indicate the readiness of these tools at UMC for RF designers."

Dr. Long-Ching Yeh, senior director of tool support and DFM at UMC, added, "UMC continues to be a foundry leader in terms of providing key design solutions to RF designers. This cooperative effort with Integrand has resulted in a solution that delivers accurate modeling results for 0.13um RF designs within a fraction of the time compared to other methods. In addition, with the newly available Optimum Inductor Finder GUI, it takes just a few seconds for designers to create an optimal inductor, a capability that significantly increases the likelihood of first-silicon success without extending design cycle time for 0.13um RFCMOS designs."

SOURCE: UMC/Integrand Software, Inc.