Between The Lines

Mentor Graphics threw a big press conference with partners Mercury Computer Systems and IBM this morning introducing Mentor's new tool called nmOPC.

The new tool is targeted at foundries as they start thinking about 45nm processes. None of the fabs are doing 45nm quite yet but when they do, they are certainly expected to need insane amounts of compute power—an order of magnitude more compute power--to perform OPC correction and then verify it in a reasonable amount of time.

Joe Sawicki, GM of Mentor's design to silicon division, says Mentor completely built nmOPC from the ground up. Where Mentor's current OPC tool, OPCpro, excels in "sparse" simulation, the new nmOPC tool employs a grid based, dense simulation engine, which the company first deployed in its OPCverify tool. The tool will run VT5 but also newer CM1 resist models. Mentor expects the nmOPC tool to gradually replace Mentor's OPCpro as the fab's tool of choice by the 22nm node

Mentor also announced that it has worked with supercomputer specialists Mercury Computer Systems to find a platform that will turbo boost nmOPC simulations. The companies evaluated FPGA, Intel processor based platforms and ultimately found that Mercury's system running blades of IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell Broadband Engine (CellBE) processors (the same processor in the PlayStation 3) is the optimal hardware platform for running nmOPC.

Typically, fabs run OPC software on a platform consisting of a master server and slave clusters. The companies claim by adding the CellBE co-processor acceleration (CPA) system drastically boosts image simulation and thus reduces overall simulation time.

Where the OPCpro on a typical master server slave cluster took 21 minutes to run a simulation, the nmOPC with CPA tacked on to typical system ran the same simulation in one minute. Mentor is quick to note the nmOPC software will indeed run on any common engineering hardware platform, Unix, Linux, etc., but says it will encourage customers to try it out with CPA. Mentor will not be selling the Mercury hardware.

The announcement seemingly counters competition in the mask and lithography tool space from newcomer Brion Technologies, which sells its own compute intensive OPC system. Brion bundles the software with custom designed hardware and its claim to fame has been optimal performance.

While neither the Brion system nor nmOPC target IC designers, the systems do however hold promise in helping fabs uncover some of the nasty OPC type effects of 45nm earlier in the design process.

If that's the case, early models of these advanced effects may find their way into next generation place and route systems to help designers proactively implement OPC-savvy features (transistors, traces and vias), which in turn hopefully means less OPC, simulation and compute power will be required during lithography and manufacturing, thus designs get to market sooner.

Mentor and Mercury declined to state a price on the combined nmOPC and CPA announcement.

As a side note, it is interesting to note that Mercury and IBM officials said while the CellBE architecture shows great promise for OPC simulations; it may also hold great promise for powering other EDA technologies. So don't be surprised if you start seeing engineering workstations based on CellBE. Panelists joked that you won't be able to play PlayStation 3 games on the systems, however, because the Mercury System doesn't come with the Sony ports.