To stay competitive, migration is essential: supporting smaller (or larger!) process nodes, alternative fabs, or diversify designs without starting from scratch. Non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs can undermine product marketing strategies: making migration or diversification prohibitively expensive and eroding your competitive advantages in the market.
Done correctly, it is possible to benefit from savings of 50 percent in both development times and costs, by intelligently employing a strategy of IP reuse to support opportunities for extending your existing products to newer processes or product variants.
However, migrating large analog or mixed-signal circuits can itself seem time consuming and can expose re-designs to problems that can be costly to resolve:
- Mapping the circuits is time consuming and it’s easy to make mistakes
- You need to account for scaling when porting to different process nodes
- You need to follow all target device parameter restrictions and create a solution to keep device parameters consistent with source designs
Without insights into where there may be problems or where there are room for improvements, designers have no insight into tolerance limits. They won’t find out about these limits until they run into them – and that’s usually too late.
All of this leaves a re-design open to potential issues which could affect design times, impact performance, as well as undermine the potential profitability of the entire process migration.
A circuit porting tool such as AMALIA OA Circuit Porting (for OpenAccess database) from Thalia, provides a familiar Cadence Virtuoso environment to quickly and easily port circuit designs.
Key steps in circuit porting using AMALIA Circuit Porting OA:
- Mapping file (Device Mapping file generator)
- Select your designs (easy-to-use GUI)
- Port automatically
- Automatically solve issues with target parameter restrictions
- Compare existing and ported designs, errors are flagged and highlighted for easy identification
- Verify the resulting design on the new process
To allow customer engineering teams to focus on developing new innovative solutions, it’s important that the IP reuse tasks such as circuit porting are supported by a strong team – this is as important as the porting tool itself. The Thalia team behind OA Circuit Porting includes experienced tool developers, mathematician, and hands-on system developers – offering customers a complete understanding of how best to port your design.
Main UI of OA Circuit porting:
OA circuit porting toolbar:
