Siemens Introduces a Power Integrity Analytical SW Tool for IC Design

Siemens Digital Industries Software’s mPower is electronic design automation (EDA) IC power integrity verification package that features what the company describes as “virtually unlimited scalability.” mPower delivers complete power, electromigration (EM), and voltage drop (IR) analysis even for today’s hugely complex, state of the art ICs.

Siemens’ mPower offers power integrity analysis for even the largest analog, digital, and mixed-signal IC designs. Image courtesy of Siemens.

 

As per Joe Sawicki, executive vice president for Siemens' IC EDA Segment, "Design companies must run both block and full-chip EM/IR analysis to confirm that the power grid delivers the necessary current to the devices and that wires will not fail prematurely." He goes on to say that  "With our innovative mPower solution, companies now have a fast, scalable dynamic analysis option for analog, digital and mixed-signal layouts of any size, as well as silicon-proven accuracy and fast turns for even the largest digital chips."

 

Solving Critical IC Design Issues

With mPower, customers can carry out sign-off analysis for IR-drop, power, and electromigration of ICs to make certain that the design will meet intended design goals when it is ultimately committed to silicon. Critical to any IC design,  EM/IR analysis is a vital step of the sign-off process of any semiconductor’s design.

Tool suits currently available from other manufacturers do not provide good scalability for analog designs, while mPower provides an EM/IR solution that scales well for both analog and digital designs, enabling customers to get high confidence results for even the largest designs. Siemens mPower customers are now working with designs of over 550 mm² at advanced nodes.

Currently, mPower can work with 5nm process technologies. With an eye toward the future, Siemens is working towards 3nm process capabilities.

 

Develop Analog ICs with Confidence

Using mPower enables analog IC designers to skip rough static analysis and SPICE simulation of select nets. Instead, they’ll enjoy highly accurate, dynamic solutions delivering simulation-based EM/IR analysis on the largest blocks and chips. With mPower, users have been able to complete first-pass EM/IR analysis of large analog IP blocks. As noted by Dr. Paolo Miliozzi, vice president of SoC Design and Technology at MaxLinear, "Siemens' mPower allows us to do something we have never been able to do before, and that is to assess EM/IR during tapeout of large analog circuits with confidence."

 

Verification of a 24-billion Transistor 7nm AI Chip

Digital designers can complete the verification of the largest digital designs with mPower. As per Darren Jones, vice president of VLSI at Esperanto, a leading developer of AI compute solutions, "Before using mPower, we could not do a single-run full chip EM/IR analysis on our 1000+ core 64-bit RISC-V AI chip." He then goes on to say that, "Using mPower enables us to run our 24-billion transistor 7nm AI chip on our server farm with fewer resources, and with better turn-around time than we previously thought possible."

 

Siemens Now Provides a Complete Power Integrity Design Flow

The mPower power integrity solution rounds out Siemens' comprehensive electro-physical signoff suite covering power, performance, and reliability analysis. Other components include:

• Calibre PERC software
• PowerPro software
• HyperLynx software
• FastSPICE for analog