June 4, 2012 -- EdXact hasy announced the availability of Belledonne for the qualification of LPE (layout parasitics extraction) tools. Belledonne allows providers of PDK (process design kits), CAD tool integrators and designers to accelerate the creation, update and delivery of PDKs and post-layout verification flows, by using a powerful measure for the accuracy of any LPE tool.

LPE is an area in EDA under heavy development. Moving to modern process nodes and smaller feature sizes, the impact of the layout parasitics is becoming a dominant woe, requiring more accurate extraction methodologies. The process of qualifying LPE tools and choosing the correct options in order to trade off between accuracy and performance of the downstream tools is a task, that has not been addressed by an industrial tool on large-scale data until today.

Belledonne has been developed as a neutral measuring instrument, that analyzes quantitatively the accuracy of post-layout netlists generated by LPE tools. Belledonne reads two netlists in DSPF, SPEF, Spice or Spectre format and compares different metrics, such as the effective resistance or the effective RC delay between thousands of pins.

Belledonne can be run in batch-mode and is integrated into EdXact's Parasitics Analysis Platform Alps. The platform has been designed with the observation, that layout parasitics need dedicated and smart analysis at advanced design nodes. The underlying mathematical database allows for very fast and accurate analyses.