IDX-PVT eliminates the need for design-by-verification, says Intento Design
Created to help analogue designers produce correct-by-construction designs rapidly, ID-Xplore is a technology-independent analogue design acceleration and migration tool for schematic-centric design flows. It is now fully integrated in the Cadence ADE (Analog Design Environment) and features IDX-PVT to accelerate analogue design further, says Intento Design.
IDX-PVT allows analogue designers to quickly determine which of the found typical valid solutions are passing the PVT corners. Smart design space partitioning algorithms quickly detect worst case corners for fast and efficient design centring, effectively immunising chips against process, voltage, and temperature variations, says the company.
Raouf Khalil, design director at Intento Design, explains: “Without IDX-PVT, the designer has to go through dozens of iteration to find the design that covers at minimum a few hundred corners with the lowest power budget and the smallest area. And all that is done manually.”
ID-Xplore/PVT quickly finds perfectly centred robust designs that satisfy performances, power, and area requirements while taking into account the design corners.
The company has also added an extension to it ID-Substrate tool. This sign-off and verification tool was introduced last year to accelerate analogue design flow and boost reliability.
ID-Substrate detects parasitic effects that are normally not found before fabrication. The tool thoroughly checks all the layers of the substrate, and a designer has the opportunity to go back to the layout or even schematic and eliminate disastrous substrate failure risks before tape-out. ID-Substrate can also be used to verify if further area reduction is possible without inducing reliability risks in smart power ICs.
The new extension, IDS-NanoFitter eliminates the need for empirical measurements and test structures. It will be available early next year, and is expected to be of interest to fabless companies and design houses to further accelerate time to market.
Intento Design was founded in 2015 with the vision to revolutionise analogue design. Its patented technology was used to create EDA aimed at accelerating and facilitating the analogue/MS IC design flow.
Its first product, ID-Xplore, reduces the time spent on lengthy simulation iterations. ID-Xplore’s electrical parameter approach means the final result is ensured to be correct-by-construction, eliminating the need for costly rework and production respins.
The Intento Design methodology keeps the designer at the centre of the process and fully in control, eliminating time consuming menial tasks and iterations and increasing productivity and ROI. The company’s tools are used by semiconductor companies – fabless to foundries – to innovate analogue faster and more effectively.
