Mentor’s Calibre and Analog FastSPICE platforms achieve certification for TSMC’s newest processes

Mentor, a Siemens business, today announced that it has achieved certification for a broad array of Mentor integrated circuit (IC) design tools for TSMC’s industry-leading N5 and N6 process technologies. In addition, Mentor’s collaboration with TSMC has extended to advanced packaging technology, further leveraging Mentor’s Calibre™ platform 3DSTACK packaging technology to support TSMC’s advanced packaging platforms.

TSMC’s N5 and N6 process technologies help many of the world’s leading IC design companies boost performance, shrink form factors and reduce power consumption for processors targeting highly competitive markets such as the automotive, Internet of Things, high performance computing, 5G mobile/infrastructure, artificial intelligence and other spaces.

"Mentor’s long and fruitful partnership with TSMC continues to help our joint customers deliver highly innovative and differentiated ICs,” said Joe Sawicki, executive vice president for Mentor’s IC Segment. “Mentor is pleased to extend this partnership with recent certifications of Mentor design platforms for TSMC’s newest and most advanced semiconductor process technologies.”

Among the many Mentor IC design technologies recently certified for TSMC’s N5 and N6 processes are:

• The Calibre nmPlatform, which is the IC physical verification industry leader. Calibre delivers outstanding performance, accuracy and reliability for the world’s most successful chipmakers and IC designers.
• The Calibre xACT extraction tool - a component of the larger Calibre nmPlatform that delivers robust parasitic extraction functionality and highly accurate parasitic data for post-layout analysis and simulation.
• Mentor’s Analog FastSPICE (AFS) Platform, which provides leading-edge circuit verification for nanometer analog, radio frequency (RF), mixed-signal, memory and custom digital circuits.

In addition to these certifications, Mentor also announced that its AFS platform now supports TSMC’s mobile and high performance computing (HPC) design platform. The certification enables Mentor’s customers targeting analog, mixed-signal and radio frequency (RF) designs for HPC applications to verify their chips with confidence in the latest TSMC processes. Mentor also announced a collaboration with TSMC to further leverage Calibre’s 3DSTACK packaging tools to support TSMC’s CoWoS® packaging technology that features a silicon interposer as a solution for inter-die port connectivity checks and Calibre xACT for parasitic extraction.

“As a valuable partner, Mentor continuously makes more and more design tools and platforms in support of the most advanced TSMC process technologies,” said Suk Lee, senior director of the Design Infrastructure Management Division at TSMC. “We’re looking forward to continuing our joint efforts with Mentor to help our mutual customers achieve their silicon success with the leading-edge electronic design automation (EDA) tools benefiting from the significant power and performance increase of TSMC’s newest technologies including our 5nm process, the most advanced foundry solution.”