CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

21 April 2009

Product News

Apache Design Solutions Introduces Totem, the Industry’s First Power and Noise Integrity Platform for Analog and Mixed-Signal Designs

Apache Design Solutions announced Totem, the industry’s first integrated power and noise integrity platform that addresses the challenges associated with global couplings of power/ground noise, substrate noise, and package / PCB capacitive and inductive noise, for analog, mixed-signal, memory, and high-speed I/O designs. Totem is a comprehensive platform that incorporates transistor-level noise injection, parasitics extraction, package modeling, dynamic analysis, and design debug in a single-flow environment.

Totem’s key technology is based on the concurrent analysis of noise propagation through the power delivery network, substrate network, and package/PCB parasitics. It accurately analyzes noise coupling effects at every time-point using a single-kernel solver. This advanced technology enables designers to account for all global noise impacts on their designs, a critical challenge for post submicron mixed-signal SoCs.

Totem is a full-chip layout-driven analysis solution integrated with existing analog environments. It provides cross-probing of analysis results with industry standard circuit design tools for efficient debugging, fixing, and optimization. Designers can use Totem for early stage prototyping to guide their power network and package design. In addition, Totem can be used for chip sign-off and post-silicon debug.

Accurate Power/Ground Noise Analysis with Full-chip Capacity

The accuracy of power noise analysis is critical for functionality, timing, and reliability of analog designs. Totem incorporates transistor-level power model with voltage de-rated switching current technique, and SPICE-accurate decoupling capacitance extraction. In addition, impact of package and board effects is included through the support of broadband S-parameter package and PCB models.

Totem delivers the capacity required for standalone DRAM, Flash, and CMOS image sensors, as well as embedded memory macros. It leverages RedHawk-NX’s mesh pattern recognition (MPR) extraction technology and multi-core simulation engine to handle hundreds of millions of transistor designs overnight.

Totem also offers simulation-based electro-migration (EM) validation for power and signal nets. It supports both Root Mean Square (RMS) and Peak current EM checks, which are critical for advanced process nodes, in addition to conventional average current-based methods.

“The ability to verify power, noise, and reliability of our full-chip DRAM design within a reasonable time is critical to our tape-out success,” said Seong-Kwan Hong, Ph.D., vice president of R&D from Hynix. “Apache’s Totem enabled us to perform dynamic analysis within a day and produced results that closely correlated to our SPICE simulation. We are very impressed with Totem’s product quality and how easily it integrated into our production flow.”

Substrate Noise Coupling (SE)

Increasing power density and higher speed of digital components creates significant noise injection into the substrate. Furthermore, limited die real estate is impacting the effectiveness of the guard-ring structure for analog macros. Accurate substrate noise analysis is critical to high performance mixed-signal and Radio Frequency (RF) designs.

Totem’s Substrate Noise (SE) technology includes extraction of the substrate network for advanced process technologies such as triple wells and various guard-ring structures. SE also provides concurrent time-domain simulation of the substrate network, power/ground mesh, and package parasitics. SE accounts for full-chip SoC substrate noise effect by directly interfacing with RedHawk to obtain accurate substrate injection signature of all digital components.

Substrate impact on analog circuitries can be analyzed using SPICE simulation with SE’s back-annotated circuit netlist including the noise waveform. This allows analog and RF designers to accurately determine the magnitude of substrate coupling effects.

“At smaller process nodes, analog circuitries become highly susceptible to power induced noise failures, a critical challenge for mixed-signal designs, especially with high performance digital blocks such as embedded processors. To ensure silicon success, we need robust circuit design techniques to mitigate substrate noise coupling,” said K. Tsuboi, senior manager from STARC. “We used Totem with SE technology to correlate its simulation results with the on-chip substrate noise measurement data. Totem is a critical part of the mixed-signal design flow to analyze the effectiveness of the noise prevention techniques.”

RedHawk, Sentinel, and Totem Eco-Platform

Apache’s power and noise integrity eco-platform for chip-package-system convergence includes RedHawk SoC, Sentinel package/PCB, and Totem analog and mixed signal platforms. After the validation of analog IPs, Totem can generate accurate and efficient Component Macro Model (CMM) for RedHawk top-level SoC analysis. CMM provides various levels of IP protection schemes, and can be used as a hand-off model for IP vendors to their customers.

For chip-package co-design, Totem also generates the widely adopted Chip Power Model (CPM) for standalone memory and analog components. CPM can be used directly in the Sentinel platform to perform package- and board-level power and signal integrity analyses with consideration of accurate on-die noise.

“The introduction of Totem noise integrity platform is an important milestone for Apache as the industry recognizes the challenges of global power and noise for chip, package, and system. The analog and mixed-signal contents in SoC and system designs are rapidly increasing and increasing the risk of noise induced failures across the system,” said Andrew Yang, CEO of Apache. “Apache’s dedicated focus to deliver the ‘best-in-class’ analysis solutions enables our customers to address their relentless demand for cost reduction and risk mitigation as their design complexity and process technology continue to scale.”

Pricing and Availability

Totem is available now with the list price starting at $250,000 USD.

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