IC Design Blog

In both my last post, and in John Ferguson’s posts, the reasons, challenges and costs associated with “waivers” for DRC were discussed.  As we have both pointed out, this is a growing problem as the IC industry increases its use of 3rd party IP while simultaneously the number of waivers within that IP is also increasing – resulting in a sea of waivers to deal with.  As we have deployed our Calibre … Read More

Waiver, Fab-lite, Fabless, Calibre, IC Design, Physical Verification, Foundries, Foundry

Historically, design rule checking (DRC) was a black or white proposition—either you passed all your DRC’s or you fixed the errors until you did pass.  Fast forward to today where much/most of the IP you use is from 3rd parties and/or your product has an increasing percentage of memory content and your design is never DRC clean at tape out.  Your design team is now constantly waiving over and over and … Read More

Foundry, Foundries, IC Design, DRC, SVRF, Tax, Waiver, Calibre, Physical Verification, Fab-lite, Productivity, Fabless, Sign-off, eqDRC, SoC, Equation-Based DRC

Since DAC we have heard a lot about physical verification tools claiming they can read the Calibre(R) SVRF/TVF syntax natively. This blog explores why competitive EDA companies are trying to use Calibre SVRF/TVF, the challenges involved, and the risks to customers. Why Do Competing PV Products Want to Use Calibre SVRF? Calibre is a primary sign-off standard at all the major foundries and IDMs, and … Read More

Foundries, Fabless, Foundry, TVF, Translators, Direct Read, PV, DRC, Sign-off, SVRF, Calibre, Syntax, IC Design, Equation-Based DRC, IDM, Fab-lite, Native Read, Physical Verification, eqDRC