News and New Products

Startup claims IC router will lead retooling for DFM age

By Michael Santarini, Sr. Editor -- EDN, 11/20/2005 9:01:00 PM

A new EDA startup called Pyxis Technology Inc. is coming out of stealth mode and says it will release mid next year a Design-for-Manufacturing-savvy digital IC router that will lead the next retooling in the implementation segment of EDA.

Pyxis is the latest of several startups to enter the DFM space. But the company's President and CEO, Naaem Zafaar says that the overwhelming majority of those vendors offer technologies that analyze designs to head-off potential errors in manufacturing. "We actually take the data from those companies and make changes to the design," says Zafaar.

Zafaar says the Pyxis router will gather information from the mask flow and use lithography models from manufacturing. The tool will also help pass design intent forward into mask making. "When the mask people get GDSII files from our users, they won't be looking at a bunch of polygons. Instead with our tool they will know where they need to spend most time on the mask, applying for example OPC (Optical Proximity Correction), he says. "This isn't done today and that's why masks are million dollars. If you can pass the intent forward, you can reduce those costs."

He says that today's popular IC routers were not built with manufacturing issues in mind."Today's routers are rules based but IC design is slowly but surely moving to model based design," Zafaar says.

That's more slowly than surely, as the industry has yet to produce yet pick a viable model format, let alone make it a standard. Synopsys has thus far come the closest to advance model with its CCS (Composite Current Source) model, but it has yet to release a statistical timing tool to support it. IBM Microelectronics, Chartered Semiconductor and others are also jointly working diligently on a model that holds critical manufacturing data without giving away process secrets.

Zafaar says that the Pyxis technology will be able to accommodate whichever model becomes popular.

"As model based design evolves, we have the ability to plug those into our designs," says Zafaar. "The model standards will be fleshed out over the next three or four years."

In the meantime, routers also need to be able to handle soft rules in addition to hard rules. An example of a hard rule is that two traces must be so many nanometers apart. A soft rule is more situational, such as using double metal or double via in non critical areas only.

"We had a few dozen rules in 180nm; 70 soft guidelines, not recommended rules for 130nn; 700 for 90nm; and there is suppose to be 2000 for 65nm," Zafaar says. "Tools don't have the ability to adequately deal with these soft rules. People end up doing a lot of post route physical optimization and run scripts. That won't go on when you get to thousands and thousands of rules. You need a new architecture which can arbitrate between these rules and give them flexibility."

Zafaar said the tool will allow users to put a priority on rules and even assign costing functions to them. "These are new knobs that allow designers to optimize their design for a given process," he says.

Zafaar, who spent many years as the vice president of marketing for Quicklogic and most recently was CEO of Silicon Design Systems and before that fingerprint IC firm Veridicom, says the Pyxis technology was developed by a tool architecture trio that has designed custom routers for companies like IBM and Sun.

Pyxis founders include, P. T. Patel, the company's EVP of Engineering and CTO; and Pyxis engineering Fellows Sharad Mehrotra and Joe Rahmeh. The company, headquarted in Santa Clara, Calif. has 25 employees with the bulk of the R&D being done out of Austin, Texas.

The company also has recruited Cadence Design Systems founder and CEO Jim Solomon to its board of directors and has drawn series A venture funding from Austin Ventures and CMEA Ventures.