( DAC 99 Item 12 ) ----------------------------------------------- [6/25/99]
"Physical Verification and Optical Proximity Correction (OPC):
The big news on this front was the almost non-existent position of
Dracula and the other tools by Cadence in a prominent role. Avanti
rolled out Hercules II which is a faster hierarchical checker with
enhanced flat mode checking. They are now claiming that their flat
and mixed mode checking for LVS is almost as good as Calibre. EPIC
Synopsys announced Cedar last month. ( http://www.epic.com )
The technology and integration leader at this years DAC for physical
verification was Mentor's Calibre. They have finally taken a lead
position in the marketplace and should not face any major competitors
for dealing with large designs (over 500K devices) mixed hierarchy
and mixed design methodology devices for the next 3-4 years. They
have a number of nice integration issues with the product that make
it very attractive -- including a standardized verification language
that extends to PDR verbiage as well as verification code. This
standard language is Mentor product independent -- that is their old
tools, current tools, and new tools will read the same decks so there
is no legacy data problem on old tech files. Additionally, they have
run-time optimization of the run decks, which allows for multiple
styles of run set development to still result in high performance
verification runs. Politically, Mentor had some major coups -- they
attracted several very high up technical people from the Avanti
Hercules program to aid the propagation of the Calibre program.
( http://www.mentorg.com )
Avanti has now _linked_ their DRC/LVS tools to some of the old TMA
process development to make a pseudo-suite for OPC. The tools have a
high degree of technical merit -- however they are not integrated
together well as yet and their support for the area is weak. Mentor,
through the acquisition of OPC technologies has developed a very
viable and usable OPC solution. They integrated the product around
the Calibre engine and created a GUI based tool for doing OPC runset
generation which is very easy for the process development people to
use. The runtime performance and data handling capabilities,
including new 64 bit fast viewers for the large databases, seem to
easily handle 1999 and 2000 OPC solutions. The MicroUnity and
Numerical Technologies folks have very high end technical OPC products
that are not really usable in a production environment. Their run
times are long, they produce only flat OPC data rather than
hierarchical which creates huge (>2GB) data files that cannot as a
result be viewed by current layout editors in any sort of convenient
fashion. (Virtuoso under 950x and IC442 has a 32bit address or 2GB
max file/data size limit). These products also do not really have a
maintainable runset structure that would allow for limited manpower
to maintain multiple process flows." ( http://www.numeritech.com )
- an anon engineer
|
|
