Samsung and Mentor Expand Calibre DFM Offering for Mutual Customers

Mentor, a Siemens business, today announced the addition of the Calibre® DFM Explorer flow control tool, created by Mentor for use by Samsung Electronics and its foundry customers as an extension to the complete suite of Calibre design for manufacturing (DFM) products that are part of Samsung’s mandatory sign-off requirements. The Calibre DFM Explorer tool is used by customers who have designs that require DFM applications running across multiple CPUs to achieve target turnaround times. By providing a single interface for the application of multiple DFM processes and the review of results, the Calibre DFM Explorer tool simplifies the signoff process flow for greater efficiency during this time-critical stage.

Samsung’s foundry customers can now access the entire Calibre DFM suite as part of Samsung’s sign-off solutions. The required suite includes Calibre LFD™ lithography hotspot detection, Calibre YieldAnalyzer random and systematic process variability analysis, Calibre Pattern Matching automated layout enhancement and reliability analysis, and Calibre YieldEnhancer advanced fill solutions and automated via optimization. The Calibre DFM offering is part of Samsung’s Closed-Loop DFM solution that makes designs more robust against process variability. Since the introduction of its Closed-Loop DFM process, Samsung has seen over 10% increases in initial yields.  

As the latest addition to the joint Samsung-Mentor offering, the Calibre DFM Explorer tool controls access to a customer’s load-sharing facility (LSF), in which multiple remote machines can be used to run multiple tool flows in parallel, using either local CPU or LSF grid resources. Designers using the Calibre DFM Explorer tool have a single convenient user interface to set up runs and track the progress of jobs. The Calibre DFM Explorer tool automatically handles job submission, monitoring, and results reporting. If any issues are found, the designer can invoke a Calibre RVE™ session from the Calibre DFM Explorer tool to review the error results and implement the necessary changes.

“The Calibre DFM Explorer tool can improve the turnaround time of design signoff through efficient operation of the DFM signoff process,” said Jaehong Park, senior vice president of the Foundry Service Team at Samsung Electronics. “By bringing all of these DFM operations into a single environment, not only it is easier and faster to analyze designs for multiple signoff DFM issues, but our customers can be assured that they would receive maximum efficiency from their computing resources.”

With the broadest, most accurate, and best-performing DFM solution in the industry, Mentor enables designers to augment their physical and electrical design verification with an expansive set of lithographic, yield, and critical feature analysis capabilities to optimize product printability, robustness, and reliability. This extension enables designers to attain the full benefit of Samsung’s world class manufacturing capabilities.

“Samsung Foundry understands the impact that Calibre DFM solutions have in improving manufacturing and yield ramp of world-class products,” said Michael Buehler-Garcia, senior director of marketing for Calibre Design Solutions in the Design-to-Silicon division of Mentor. “By working together to develop an optimized environment to specifically assist analysis of large-chip DFM issues, we enable our mutual customers to best leverage Samsung Foundry’s unique process offerings via Calibre’s production-proven DFM capabilities.”