Mentor Graphics has made two announcements recently that focus on collaborations with industry partners for backend manufacturability tools. The first one with TSMC that addresses metal fill, and the second with NuFlare on mask generation.

SmartFill

Mentor is working to support SmartFill functionality in the Calibre® YieldEnhancer product for TSMC’s manufacturing processes starting at 65nm. The analysis and automatic filling capabilities of the SmartFill solution allow designers to achieve IC fill constraints with minimal impact on circuit performance in a single pass without manual customization or modification.

SmartFill integrates the full range of the Calibre analysis engines into the fill process to achieve fully optimized fill without manual iterations. It provides advanced capabilities such as multi-layer fill shapes and the ability to add fill cells, which are automatically inserted into a layout based on analysis of the design.
SmartFill uses continuous, multi-dimensional functions in place of linear pass-fail conditions, enabling finer resolution of complex fill algorithms that cannot be performed with single-dimensional design rules alone. This allows customers to optimize for multiple factors such as density and perimeter.

Since SmartFill employs standard Calibre interfaces, it fits seamlessly into the customer’s existing design environment. It supports timing aware fill with back annotation of fill shapes into all industry leading design databases to enable final timing verification. It also allows customers to provide a list of critical nets that receive special treatment during the fill procedure.

Mask Production

Mentor and NuFlare Technology, Inc. (Jasdaq: 6256) today announced the extension of their collaboration on integrated hardware and software solutions for advanced IC mask generation.

The new agreement covers the Mentor Graphics Calibre® FRACTUREt™, Calibre FRACTUREv™, Calibre MDPmerge™, Calibre MDPverify™, Calibre nmMPC and Calibre MDPview™ products. These are used with NuFlare mask writers starting with the EBM-3000, all the way up to the EBM-8000 series, and are being expanded for future generation machines to perform data preparation, process correction and verification of mask data to improve the fidelity of the final mask pattern. NuFlare will also use Mentor tools to explore innovations during research and development, to verify new product features, and to assist in customer support. Past efforts between Mentor and NuFlare have resulted in the definition of an OASIS.MASK input interface and the definition of format extensions to carry dose annotation for advanced mask writing on future generation tools.