Cadence Quantus solution meets 16nm FinFET challenges

Cadence Design Systems Inc. recently announced the Quantus QRC extraction solution had been certified for TSMC 16nm FinFET.

What's the uniqueness about the Cadence Quantus QRC Extraction solution?  KT Moore, senior group director – Product Marketing, Digital and Signoff Group, Cadence Design Systems, said: "There are several parasitic challenges that are associated with advanced node designs — especially FinFET – and it’s not just about tighter geometries and new design rules. We can bucket these challenges into two main categories: increasing complexity and modeling challenges.

"The number of process corners is exploding, and for FinFET devices specifically, there is an explosion in the parasitic coupling capacitances and resistances. This increases the design complexity and sizes. The netlist is getting bigger and bigger, and as a result, there is an increase in extraction runtimes for SoC designs and post-layout simulation and characterization runtimes for custom/analog designs.

"Our customers consistently tell us that, for advanced nodes, and especially for FinFET designs, while their extraction runtimes and time-to-signoff is increasing, their actual time-to-market is shrinking and putting an enormous amount of pressure on designers to deliver on-time tapeout. In order to address these market pressures, we have employed the massively parallel technology that was first introduced in our Tempus Timing Signoff Solution and Voltus IC Power Integrity Solution to our next-generation extraction tool, Quantus QRC Extraction Solution.

"Quantus QRC Extraction Solution enables us to deliver up to 5X better performance than competing solutions and allows scalability of up to 100s of CPUs and machines."

Support for FinFET features
How is Quantus providing significant enhancements to support FinFET features?

Parasitic extraction is at the forefront with the introduction of any new technology node. For FinFET designs, it’s a bit more challenging due to the introduction of non-planar FinFET devices. There are more layers to be handled, more RC effects that need to be modeled and an introduction of local interconnects. There are also secondary and third order manufacturing effects that need to modeled, and all these new features have to be modeled with precise accuracy.

Performance and turnaround times are absolutely important, but if you can’t provide accuracy for these devices — especially in correlation to the foundry golden data — designers would have to over-margin their designs and leave performance on the table.

Best-in-class accuracy
How can Cadence claim that it has the 'tightest correlation to foundry golden data at TSMC vs. competing solutions'? And, why 16nm only?

According to Moore, the foundry partner, TSMC, asserts that Quantus QRC Extraction Solution provides best-in-class accuracy, which was referenced in the recent press announcement:

“Cadence Quantus QRC Extraction Solution successfully passed TSMC’s rigorous parasitic extraction certification requirements to achieve best-in-class accuracy against the foundry golden data for FinFET technology.”

FinFET structures present unique challenges since they are non-planar devices as opposed to its CMOS predecessor, which is a planar device. We partnered with TSMC from the very beginning to address the modeling challenges, and we’ve seen many complex shapes and structures over the year that we’ve modeled accurately.

"We’re not surprised that TSMC has recognized our best-in-class accuracy because we’re the leader in providing extraction solutions for RF designs. Cadence Quantus QRC Extraction Solution has been certified for TSMC 16nm FinFET, however, it’s important to note that we’ve been certified for all other technology nodes and our QRC techfiles are available to our customers from TSMC today."