May 29, 2012 -- Mentor Graphics Corp. today announced that GlobalFoundries will use the SmartFill facilities of the Calibre product to enable advanced fill techniques for 20-nm manufacturing processes. The multi-layer fill analysis and cell-based fill-generation capabilities of the SmartFill system help designers deal with complex fill interactions at advanced nodes with minimal impact on circuit performance. Moreover, Calibre SmartFill delivers greatly reduced post-fill GDS database size and faster run-times compared to traditional dummy fill. Used with the design kit provided by GlobalFoundries, Calibre SmartFill lets designers meet IC-fill constraints in a single pass without manual customization or modification, further reducing tape-out cycle times.

"At 20 nanometers, the fill strategy becomes much more sophisticated because it's no longer just about planarity," said Maq Mannan, Director of PDK development at GlobalFoundries. "Besides CMP-ECD issues, you have to consider a whole range of interrelated effects, such as etch, lithography, stress, rapid thermal annealing (RTA) and other issues essential to successful manufacturing. Calibre's integrated fill analysis and cell-based approach makes fill more precise, while achieving target run-time and output file size."

GlobalFoundries' 20nm-LPM technology is a comprehensive and cost-effective platform, delivering up to 40% performance improvement and twice the gate density of 28nm. The company's Fab 8 in New York began running full-loop 20-nm silicon in January, and silicon delivery is expected in 2H 2012.

New capabilities for advanced fill requirements

The Calibre SmartFill solution provides advanced capabilities such as multi-layer fill shapes and user-defined fill cells, which are automatically inserted into a layout based on analysis of the design. It also supports continuous, multi-dimensional functions in place of linear pass-fail conditions, resulting in finer resolution of complex fill algorithms that cannot be performed with single-dimension design rules alone. This allows designers to simultaneously optimize for multiple factors such as density and perimeter.

The SmartFill capability fits seamlessly into the customer's existing design environment, enabling timing-aware fill with back-annotation of fill shapes into all leading design databases to support final timing verification. The SmartFill product also lets a designer define a list of critical nets that require special treatment during the fill procedure.