14 DAY TRIAL // Helic S.A. today announced the availability of the new VeloceRF v1.5, featuring an enhanced Spiral Wizard inductor synthesizer, several improvements in its fast RLCK modeling engine and new features addressing Design for Manufacturability (DFM) for 90-nm and 65-nm RFICs. Moreover, the VeloceRF v.1.5 has already been installed in the RFIC design flows of one 65-nm and five 90-nm IDM process design kits worldwide.
The new VeloceRF version addresses DFM requirements emerging for RF CMOS at the 90nm process node and below, as the product sports enhanced features such as conductor track slotting to mitigate metal stress, geometry resizing under current density constraints and the use of dummy fill patterns, which are now programmed in the VeloceRF inductor library and are consistently supported by the Spiral Wizard, the modeling engine and the layout and LVS modules.
"With this version we manage to keep abreast of customer needs and address properly problems that have surfaced in the past year or so, with RFIC designs entering the 90-nm node. Keys to success have been the long-term collaboration with lead customers and our continuous research on modeling algorithms and design flow improvements," said Mr. Apostolos Liapis, Helic's EDA Tools Manager. The company also announced that it will provide the new version of VeloceRF to all existing customers under maintenance contracts free of charge.
The engine's speed is said to be one of the highest in the industry, as it outperforms all commercial EM simulators and shape-based extraction tools. Built-in netlist reduction keeps netlist sizes and simulation times at reasonable levels, without loss of model precision. But also the technology file setup has been made easier, reading directly from readily available foundry process stackup data.
"The Spiral Wizard synthesis engine in VeloceRF v1.5 now supports the creation of patterned shields that enhance inductor quality factor (Q) and improve substrate isolation. This capability is coupled with options to stack metal layers with distributed vias, to achieve good Q values even in low-cost processes that lack a thick inductor layer option. These tactics are not necessarily advantageous in all frequencies or for any spiral geometry, so the Spiral Wizard is equipped with the necessary intelligence to decide on their application, depending on user criteria and constraints," explained the company.
VeloceRaptor, the vector-based RLCK modeling engine that powers VeloceRF now introduces a proprietary broadband skin-effect model, with demonstrated accuracy even above 30 GHz. Several improvements provide even better coverage of distributed capacitive and mutual inductance parasitics in complex layouts.