Overview
PeakView™ EM Prototyping tool addresses the capability of circuit-level EM isolation, coupling and crosstalk simulation at early stage of the design cycle while the layout and perspective EM device placement and connectivity is still under construction and not reached the state of LVS completion. In other words throughout any stage of the design cycle, the millimeter wave IC design team may begin to evaluate the physical EM effect of crosstalk and coupling among EM devices and/or the interconnect accurately and precisely to analyse the overall circuit performance under very high frequencies. The tool will automate the preparation of multiple EM devices for simulation, modeling and back-annotation while preserving the connectivity throughout the design hierarchy.
Key Benefits
- Full-Wave 3D EM Solver ensures accuracy from DC to Terahertz frequency range.
- Circuit-level EM isolation, coupling and crosstalk modeling throughout design stages.
- Full EM model and HPBM back annotation to hierarchical top cell schematic & test bench
EM Prototyping with EM Isolation
For EM Prototyping, we offer a way for designer to navigate and mitigate the EM coupling effect on the design performance among and between EM devices and/or Interconnects. We leverage the precise accuracy of 3D full wave solver technology along with the ease of use EM result back-annotation techniques to enable users to precisely foresee the impacts of EM couple effects on the overall chip performance before LVS or tape-out. Such capability drastically increase the accuracy and confidence of the high frequency design early on.
EM isolation analysis is a specialized field of EM simulation, which focus on the EM design and simulation techniques related to couplings and isolations. For modern RF and 5G SOC designs, EM isolation analysis is essential and critical for sensitive and elusive high speed circuits to ensure design success. Traditional parasitic extractions do not have the full-wave frequency accuracy for the detailed remote coupling analysis under EM Isolation scenario, hence the traditional EM tools are not well developed nor qualified for EM Isolation analysis to capture the targeted EM isolation noise floor.
EM isolation noise floor defines the lowest coupling value that EM tools can capture without losing numerical accuracy or physical meaning. Today, PeakView is capable of handling severe EM Isolation Analysis needs: It achieves -110dB for the EM isolation noise floor with HCS and flat engine, and -130dB as the maximum EM isolation noise floor. EM isolation is the ratio of mutual term over self term to measure the coupling effects relative to the source of couplings.
EM Isolation analysis is also aided by built-in formula, post-processing and visualization/animation features.
Example: EM Isolation design techniques can be explored through increasing the design distance, guard rings, grounding structures, patterned ground shields, and NTN/BFMOAT process structures.
Powerful Schematic Back-Annotation of EM Results
The powerful back-annotation of the EM result to the original schematic enable users to quickly and accurately re-simulate the design with the effect of EM models obtained from the EM prototyping tool. This greatly eliminated the error-prone manual intervention of inserting the EM models throughout design hierarchy.