India, June 2, 2014 – ANSYS, Inc. and TowerJazz (NASDAQ/TASE: TSEM), the global specialty foundry leader announced a collaboration to deliver comprehensive power noise and reliability sign-off flow for mutual customers. With increased use of analog and radio frequency (RF) integrated circuits (ICs) in a variety of electronic systems including consumer, automotive, medical and industrial applications, the ability to accurately predict the performance of these ICs prior to production has become a critical design challenge.
Through this collaboration, ANSYS and TowerJazz created a foundry certified power noise analysis process design kit (PDK) that includes reference flow guidelines, collateral, example test cases and flow setup guidance that will enable analog and RF designers to produce optimized integrated circuits faster and with confidence, minimizing cost and maximizing manufacturing yield. The reference flow enables mutual customers to efficiently utilize ANSYS Totem™ and ANSYS PathFinder™ and facilitate the manufacturing of their products in accordance with TowerJazz’s process requirements. These tools are essential since voltage drop and specialized reliability checks such as electromigration (EM) and electrostatic discharge (ESD) simulations cannot be performed using Layout Versus Schematic (LVS), Design Rule Check (DRC) and extracted simulation tools.
“As the mixed-signal and analog content increase in various markets, a robust and foundry certified power noise and reliability sign-off flow becomes critical,” said Aveek Sarkar, Vice President of product engineering and support at Apache Design, a subsidiary of ANSYS. “By collaborating with TowerJazz, we are able to provide optimized tools and methodologies for joint customers to enable a clean design flow, higher yield and reduced field failures.”
“A close collaboration between TowerJazz and Apache on custom analog design kit development enables our customers to efficiently deliver more robust and reliable designs for next-generation electronic products,” said Ori Galzur, Vice President of VLSI design center at TowerJazz. “This design kit will enable our customers to use the industry’s standard power, noise and reliability sign-off solution on our industry leading technology.”
The ANSYS portfolio of product offerings will be showcased at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) June 2-4 in booth #1413. TowerJazz’s reference design demo will be shown at this conference on June 3 in booth #1301.