The Customer
TowerJazz is a specialty foundry that manufactures integrated
circuits (ICs) for more than 150 customers worldwide. The
company offers specialty CMOS and digital CMOS process
technologies with geometries ranging from 1.0 to 0.13 micron.
The specialty offerings cover a wide breadth of applications, like
the high-voltage TS18PM or the high-frequency SBC18 270GHz
Silicon Germanium BiCMOS.
The company also provides foundry microelectromechanical
systems (MEMS)-enablement solutions combined with high-
volume 150mm and 200mm CMOS wafer manufacturing.
The TowerJazz Customer Design Support team works with
customers to answer their design tool and flow questions,
select the best technologies, and understand process design kit
(PDK) functionalities so that customers can successfully design
their products. Robert Milkovits, Director of Customer Design
Support, leads this team and is also an architect for TowerJazz
PDKs and electronic design automation (EDA) tool flows.
The Challenge
TowerJazz first began working with Cadence as a foundry
partner in 2002 to enhance product differentiation and custom-
ization for its customers’ analog and mixed-signal specialty
products.
“Because of our focus on specialty products, we must offer tools
and flexibility that wouldn’t be found in a standard digital CMOS
flow,” Milkovits explains. “We needed to give our customers
a solid tool flow so they could get to market quickly, with
minimum interruptions.”
TowerJazz and Cadence
“Cadence provides a complete package—a single vendor for everything from schematic to verification to layout
to extraction to digital flow. In addition, Cadence is an industry leader, which provides us with access to the
best technology and the largest design ecosystem.”
Robert Milkovits, Director of Customer Design Support, TowerJazz
Business Challenges
• Time-to-market pressures
• Rising development costs
Design Challenge
• Product differentiation and customization
for analog and mixed-signal specialty
products
Cadence Solutions
• Virtuoso unified custom/analog flow
• Virtuoso Schematic Editor
• Virtuoso Analog Design Environment
• Virtuoso Space-Based Router
• Cadence QRC Extraction
• Cadence Services
Results
• Complete, customized offerings with a wide
array of tools and functions
• Lower development costs
• Faster time to market
Cadence is transforming the global electronics industry through a vision called EDA360.
With an application-driven approach to design, our software, hardware, IP, and services help
customers realize silicon, SoCs, and complete systems efficiently and profitably. www.cadence.com
© 2011 Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Cadence, the Cadence logo, Virtuoso, and Spectre are registered trademarks of Cadence
Design Systems, Inc. All others are properties of their respective holders. 22406 12/11 MK/DM/PDF
The Solution
TowerJazz selected the Cadence
®
Virtuoso
®
unified custom/
analog flow to automate certain aspects of custom IC design
for its customers. Using selective automation during custom
IC design allows engineers to focus on the important business
of differentiating their designs. Virtuoso Schematic Editor, the
Cadence circuit design solution, enables fast and accurate entry
of design concepts—and it manages design intent.
Cadence also offers an advanced design environment that allows
designers to characterize, visualize, and understand the many
interdependencies of an analog, RF, or mixed-signal design and
their effects on circuit performance. Highly integrated mixed-
signal designs can be difficult to simulate correctly due to the
relationship between digital control circuitry and analog blocks.
The Virtuoso platform enables co-simulation of digital and analog
blocks, which is vital to evaluating digital-analog interaction and
validating the functionality of the design.
“We need to offer highly accurate models for our customers
in the RF market space,” Milkovits says. “We add functionality
and flexibility to Cadence SKILL-based PDKs to give customers
a complete, customized package. Our goal is to enable as many
tools and functions as possible for our customers.”
For example, a customer with a large design team may require
Virtuoso Space-Based Router functionality for custom place-and-
route. So TowerJazz adds features to support Cadence place-and-
route tools in the PDK. Or, if a customer needs capabilities for
electrical and statistical analysis, verification, and optimization of
analog/mixed-signal designs, TowerJazz includes support in the
PDK for Virtuoso Analog Design Environment (ADE).
“Virtuoso ADE is particularly powerful to our customers because
they can set up a variety of testbenches and do a Monte Carlo
analysis looking for design sensitivities,” Milkovits says. “The tool
gives them a clear picture of what circuit device behavior will be
so they can create designs that function robustly across variations
in the manufacturing process. After customers run the simulation
they can see how it ties to the manufacturing process and then
tune for circuit sensitivity without overdesigning.”
IAcross the board, TowerJazz PDKs, which draw upon Cadence
technology, enable high-level functionality and tools. Because the
tools have already been validated, customer design teams enjoy
faster access to these functionalities.
TowerJazz partners with Cadence because it provides “a
complete mixed-signal design solution—a single vendor for
everything from schematic to verification to layout to extraction
to digital flow,” Milkovits says. “In addition, Cadence is the
mixed-signal industry leader, which provides us with access to the
best technology and the largest design ecosystem.”
Cadence also offers mature and production-proven technol-
ogies. One example is Cadence QRC Extraction, which performs
efficient, accurate parasitic extraction on mainstream and
advanced-node designs to speed convergence on design goals.
“With QRC Extraction, our customers get accurate extraction,
including high-frequency effects, within an easy timeframe,”
Milkovits says. “There’s a very well-thought-out flow that also
allows them to include digital logic into specialty products.
A customer can pull digital control logic easily into an analog
design and use a tried-and-true flow to validate the design with
assurance. Other tool vendors don’t offer this trusted flow.”
A key benefit is the consistency of this flow from one stage of
design to the next. The Virtuoso platform provides a unified
interface for creating and reviewing the design, starting from
the schematic, through simulation in Virtuoso ADE, and then
through creation and simulation of extracted simulation views
using QRC Extraction. Designers can use additional features in
ADE to automate the comparison of design behavior along these
different design stages; for example, evaluating how the design
behaves when parasitics are included or different simulation
model corners or control conditions are considered. This consis-
tency of the flow helps design teams be more efficient while
improving accuracy with technologies such as QRC Extraction.
TowerJazz also finds special value in Cadence Services. Cadence
Services has created several advanced analog IP blocks, like
ADCs and DACs, which TowerJazz offers to their customers. The
two companies have also partnered to provide design services
to mutual customers, allowing customers to leverage Cadence
Services together with TowerJazz manufacturing expertise.
Summary
Cadence has helped TowerJazz adopt a mixed-signal design
flow that enables an extremely efficient design cycle. Used in
combination with TowerJazz PDKs, customers get the unique
design tools and services they need.
TowerJazz plans to continue working with Cadence to help its
customers take advantage of new custom IC design technologies
and to support them as they migrate from the Virtuoso 5.1 to
the Virtuoso 6.1 environment. Simultaneously, TowerJazz will be
working on its next-generation PDKs. “We see great features in
Virtuoso 6.1 and we look forward to offering these benefits to
our customers,” Milkovits says.
Together with Cadence, we’re accomplish-
ing our mission to lower development
costs and get to market faster.”
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