Siemens extends support of multiple IC design solutions for Samsung Foundry's latest process technologies

Plano, TX, USA -- November 17, 2021 -- Siemens Digital Industries Software today announced it has enabled several of its leading electronic design automation (EDA) product families for the latest versions of Samsung Foundry’s advanced processes, including Siemens’ solutions targeting advanced packaging, electrostatic discharge (ESD) rules and integrated circuit (IC) design in the cloud.

“Samsung Foundry is pleased to work closely with Siemens, which continues to increase its value to the Samsung Foundry ecosystem by offering more features in support of our latest processes,” said Sangyun Kim, vice president of Foundry Design Technology Team at Samsung Electronics. “Siemens has been a strong partner for many years, and we continue to further grow our strong and highly-valued partnership in helping our mutual customers bring to market compelling new IC innovations.”

Advanced packaging solutions

Samsung has successfully evaluated Siemens’ digitally integrated High Density Advanced Packaging (HDAP) flow for the foundry’s MDI™ (multi-die-integration) packaging process. For customers, this optimization helps enable seamless integration across multiple dies through construction of the complete MDI package assembly, allowing customers more choices on how to deliver new products to market on time and with greater performance and quality.

The Siemens tools successfully evaluated by Samsung for the foundry’s advanced packaging technology include:

• The Xpedition™ Substrate Integrator software, which Samsung used to generate a top-level “golden” system netlist for 3D LVS verification with Calibre® 3DSTACK software. This netlist delivers foundry qualified sign-off MDI heterogeneous 3.5D structures.
• Xpedition Package Designer, which Samsung successfully evaluated for physical implementations of its 3.5D Silicon Interposer. This is a first for a package design tool targeting Samsung’s MDI technology, and it enables early-stage PSI (power and signal integrity) analysis in connection with Siemens’ HYPERLYNX™ suite of tools.
• HYPERLYNX, which supports PSI analysis of SerDes and HBM (high bandwidth memory) channels implemented on Samsung’s 3.5D Silicon Interposer.
• The Calibre xACT™ 3D software and Calibre xL parasitic extraction tools, which quickly and accurately extract RCLK parasitics in highly complex 2.5D and 3D packaging configurations. The Calibre parasitic extraction tools help enable signal integrity-aware analysis of the entire HBM channel implemented on the 3.5D Silicon Interposers.

ESD rule deck qualifications

Verification for design compliance with foundry electrostatic discharge (ESD) rules is a critical step in the design tape out process. The number of checks required, combined with the sheer volume of design data for full chip simulation at advanced technology nodes, demands an extremely robust physical reliability platform.

Siemens’ Calibre PERC software’s advanced algorithm development functionality, parallel compute capabilities, and automated context-aware architecture have created a paradigm shift in analysis methodology. These developments have slashed the runtime of full chip ESD verification by half while maintaining accuracy, improving verification quality, increasing checking coverage, and allowing for world-class speed in new kit development. Working closely with Samsung, Siemens developed a flow capable of being automated from a single configuration file. This flow can rapidly generate verification kits for different technologies and with minimal development effort. Samsung Foundry is the first foundry globally to leverage the parallel compute capabilities of Calibre PERC in their ESD checking solution. All of these have resulted in dramatically improved runtimes, reliability, and maintainability for Samsung’s advanced full chip PERC analysis kits.

Samsung and Calibre in the cloud

Siemens and Samsung have also developed best practices for design teams looking to leverage cloud scaling for even faster physical verification run times. These best practices include setting up batch Calibre nmDRC runtimes, in addition to other Calibre products that design teams might choose to run, such as Calibre SmartFill software, once they have placed their design on the cloud. Samsung and Siemens will present the results of this joint project, which leveraged the Calibre tool’s latest engine technologies and Calibre design kits tuned for cloud environments, at the upcoming Samsung SAFE Conference on November 17, 2021.

"Samsung Foundry’s long-term partnership with Siemens continues to help our shared customers deliver highly innovative and differentiated ICs,” said Joe Sawicki, executive vice president for Siemens’ IC EDA segment. “With these optimized Siemens solutions in advanced packaging and cloud computing, our mutual customers have more options in getting their products created.”

Siemens Digital Industries Software is driving transformation to enable a digital enterprise where engineering, manufacturing and electronics design meet tomorrow. The Xcelerator portfolio helps companies of all sizes create and leverage digital twins that provide organizations with new insights, opportunities and levels of automation to drive innovation. For more information on Siemens Digital Industries Software products and services, visit www.sw.siemens.com .