CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
1 March 2005
Implementation Investments
Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Standardizes on Synopsys' DFM Tool Suite To Reduce GDSII-to-Mask Turnaround Time
Synopsys, Inc. and Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (Grace), a fast growing pure IC foundry located in Shanghai, China, announced Grace's adoption of Synopsys' design for manufacturing (DFM) tool suite. Grace adopted the Proteus optical proximity correction (OPC) software and SiVL® lithography verification tool to reduce mask turnaround time and to increase its ability to manufacture high-yielding chips.
"We selected Synopsys' leading-edge DFM tool suite because it provides us with the most scalable and flexible solution available to improve the manufacturing process for both Grace and our customers," said Hao Fan, senior director of TD for Grace Semiconductor. "By using Synopsys' distributed processing architecture we obtained near-linear scalability for OPC conversion. This substantially decreased our turnaround time without sacrificing the accuracy of our designs in silicon."
Grace turned to Synopsys' leading DFM tools to improve the manufacturability of designs. The distributed processing capabilities of Synopsys' tool suite allow Grace to offer its customers fast turnaround time in performing OPC, lithography verification and MDP. As leading-edge chip designs push for higher performance and functionality, the size of GDSII files, and the subsequent runtimes of the DFM tools, are also significantly increasing. Synopsys' Proteus software and SiVL lithography verification tool reduce turnaround time substantially through their ability to simultaneously utilize hundreds of central processing units (CPUs) at once.
"Grace's standardization on Synopsys' DFM tool suite reinforces Synopsys' leadership in the design for manufacturing space," said Edmund Cheng, vice president of Marketing for the Silicon Engineering Group at Synopsys. "Synopsys is committed to delivering best-in-class DFM solutions to companies like Grace to help ensure the manufacturability of the most advanced semiconductor designs and to achieve the fastest time to results."
Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (Grace) is a pure IC foundry company that specializes in integrated circuit (IC) fabrication. Grace is located in Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park in Pudong, Shanghai, with a total land area of 240,000 square meters and a first-phase investment of $1.63 billion. Two Fabs with one based on 12-inch wafer specifications have been constructed. Currently, Fab 1A (8") is in full production. It already reached a monthly capacity of 27,000 8-inch wafers by the end 2004. More information about Grace is available at http://www.gsmcthw.com/.
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