Design-to-Manufacturing Handoff Eased
With Tool Offerings
With the pain of moving an IC from design to
manufacturing increasing with each shrinking
process generation, EDA companies alongside
their manufacturing counterparts have been working
through SEMI to create a new and efficient way
to share that data.
While the GDSII database format has long
been the route designs took so that mask writers
and pattern generators would recognize the
design data, the industry has known for some
time that this translator was running out
of steam, only accepting 16-bit or 32-bit
files.
Enter Oasis, a new data transfer format effort,
which began in June 2001 in order to replace
the ailing GDSII which could barely handle
the enormous file sizes that mask shops and
mask pattern generators were having to contend
with -- some as large as 600 gigabytes.
The Oasis translator was launched in September
2002 at the BACUS industry conference and
ratified as a SEMI standard one year later,
September 2003.
Tom Grebinski, CEO and president of Oasis
Tooling Inc., an Alamo, Calif.-based start-up
was instrumental in Oasis’ development.
“One of my responsibilities after [the
ratification of the standard] that the creation
of an implementation strategy to help people
adopt the language, which is much more extensive
than GDSII. It needs more support and tools
than anyone has,” he said in an interview
yesterday.
“Even large EDA companies really didn’t
have the ability to create Oasis files at
first, and even then, had trouble pulling
tools available,” Grebinski continued.
As is the case with a variety of EDA industry
efforts, the companies had trouble developing
tools as a collaborative effort because Oasis
was so complex, but mainly because it would
contain source code the EDA leaders didn’t
want anyone to have.
So Grebinski took it upon himself to do what
the SEMI working group wouldn’t -- begun
tool development on his own. After pulling
together a team based on the SEMI working
group comprised of representatives from industry
leaders from both EDA and semiconductor companies,
the group began to develop translators, verification
tools and acceptance tools -- resulting in
the toolset, available at the company’s
Web site. Oasis Tooling’s Mosaic Translator,
available for free download until June 2005,
is the first OpenAccess-to-Oasis translator
in the industry, which converts design data
into mask layout data efficiently than GDSII.
“The Mosaic Translator is the first
step toward using native Oasis for mask data
preparation, mask pattern generation and mask
defect detection systems. People who have
adopted OpenAccess now have a direct path
to mask manufacturing. It is also the first
bi-directional tool providing communication
between manufacturing and design, and supports
the eventual establishment of a universal
data model,” Grebinski explained.
Oasis is an advanced, IC-to-mask layout data
transformation standard owned and maintained
by SEMI, which supplants the GDSII stream
as the data output to the mask shops from
IC design. OpenAccess is a community effort
to provide true interoperability, not just
data exchange, among IC design tools through
an open standard data API and reference database
supporting that API for IC design. The OpenAccess
Coalition is a neutral organization of industry
leaders that are leading this effort operating
under the Si2 industry group.
One of the reasons Oasis is superior to GDSII
is that it was built on an “x-bit format”
meaning that it can go up to 1024-bit, which
enables more data to be pushed through a pipe.
GDSII is a 16-bit and 32-bit format and considering
mask writers are at 29-bits, GDSII is running
out of steam.
Further, Oasis is randomly accessible, which
enables those working on the design to get
to the part of the design they are seeking
very quickly, compared to GDSII, which is
sequentially accessible.
Most significantly for the design for manufacturing
(DFM) impact, Oasis translator is bi-directional,
meaning that once the design is sent through
to manufacturing and there is an error, it
can be pinpointed, the designer can fix the
error and the changes can be sent through
the DFM chain without having to start the
mask-making process from scratch.
Also, Grebinski noted that one of the problems
when an IC design is encapsulated in GDSII,
data is fractured, and the design is flattened,
removing any hierarchy. With Oasis, hierarchy
is maintained, thereby retaining the ability
to pinpoint errors, which overall could result
in time-savings of 70 percent for data prep
time.
This is the first tool to date that allows
translation of all the data formats that EDA
creates, working in conjunction with OpenAccess,
developed for the creation of an industry
standard database.
It appears this is the long-anticipated link
tying design with manufacturing. In support
of the Oasis standard, earlier this month
Mentor Graphics Corp. announced its Calibre
products now accept Oasis files and support
Oasis output in the upcoming production release
scheduled for this month, which includes the
GDS-to-Oasis translator, previously made publicly
available for validation and verification
of the new format.
Mentor reported then that its beta test partners,
selected from among the world’s major
semiconductor developers, foundries and mask
manufacturers, translated thousands of files,
proving overall flow efficiency and confirming
a file size reduction of between 10X and 50X.
Cadence Design Systems Inc. also has its
hat in the DFM ring with its MaskCompose tool
that Renesas Technology Corp. has standardized
on, the companies reported yesterday.
Renesas said MaskCompose enables it to capture
reticle floorplans, wafer layouts, and fabrication
data for fast, automated and error-free data
generation within its 90nm process. By using
MaskCompose to improve its reticle design
flow, Renesas said it has enhanced flexibility
while speeding interaction between device
engineering and manufacturing.
