Primarius Technologies today announced its SDEP intelligent spec-driven model extraction platform has been adopted by Samsung Foundry.
SDEP helps Samsung Foundry and its customers significantly shorten turnaround time for SPICE model development, accelerating development competitiveness at legacy nodes, and enabling fast Design Technology Co-Optimization (DTCO) iterations at advanced process nodes. By continuously embedding know-how in the customized flow, engineers can run automated flows with more than 50% efficiency improvement for curve fitting. That solves resource shortage problems for multiple projects and ensures high-delivery quality of SPICE models independent of engineer’s experience level.
“Samsung and Primarius achieved another success with SDEP’s adoption after intensive testing and qualification of the technology on our advanced process platforms,” remarks Jongwook Kye, Executive Vice President of Foundry Design Enablement Team at Samsung Electronics. “Our mutual customers will benefit from having faster time to market with reduced model development and delivery time. With a SDEP setup, we can provide high-quality SPICE model and meet increasing customer demands with our available engineering resources.”
“Samsung has been a long-time Primarius customer and a strategic partner,” comments Dr. Zhihong Liu, Primarius’ Chairman and CEO. “SDEP is a revolutionary technology to enable an efficient DTCO and meet the toughest needs from advanced process development. We’re glad that SDEP is being adopted by Samsung Foundry, which enables fast iterations with design groups and further increases Primarius’ value as a Samsung SAFE ecosystem partner.”
SPICE modeling is more challenging and takes more effort at smaller technology nodes where device characteristics are more complicated. It now takes several months to develop a full SPICE model library for IC design after process technology development is completed.
In the post-Moore’s Law era, challenges include continuous shrinking of transistors and new process platforms for different applications using older technology nodes. Each variety of a process platform requires a dedicated effort on SPICE model development and foundries see more model development requests than previous generations. As a result, delivery of fast and accurate SPICE models with limited engineering resources is a challenge when faster time to market and quick iterations between process development and circuit designs are expected.
About SDEP
An innovative model development platform designed to tackle advanced SPICE modeling challenges, SDEP provides a system to retain and receive device modeling expertise and build automated flows for different process platforms and applications with intelligent target-oriented algorithms. Modeling experts can establish fully customized model auto-extraction flows for different applications using powerful and flexible modules available. With a built-in parallel SPICE as the core simulation engine for fast performance, it has integrated data analysis and validation utilities, rich parameter control and optimization functions as well as flow automation features.
