ANSYS Enters the League of 10nm Designs with TSMC

by
Pawan Fangaria
Published on 04-09-2015 05:00 PM
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The way we are seeing technology progression these days is unprecedented. Its just
about six months ago, I had written about the intense collaboration between ANSYS
and TSMC on the 16nm FinFET based design flow and TSMC certifying ANSYS tools
for TSMC 16nm FF+ technology and also conferring ANSYS with Partner of the
Year award. Read ANSYS Tools Shine at FinFET Nodes!. Just before this Intel also
certified ANSYS tools at 14nm Tri-gate process as written in another article, Intel
& ANSYS Enable 14nm Chip Production. And this week, TSMC has certified ANSYS
Power Integrity and Electromigration (EM) solutions for 10nm FinFET process
node. Its amazing progress! Read the press release here.
ANSYS portfolio of products was showcased in the TSMC Technology Symposium
held in San Jose, California on 7th April, 2015. ANSYS RedHawk and Totem were
certified by TSMC for 10nm FinFET DRM and Spice models. These tools were
certified to provide solutions for static and dynamic voltage drop analysis and
advanced signal and power EM verification that are required for ultra-low power
and high performance SoC designs at 10nm for mobile, computing and networking
applications.
At 10nm process node the devices are left with extremely low noise and reliability
margins and FinFETs structure is typically prone to increasing self-heat.

As shown in the picture, heating happens at the device (FEOL) as well as

interconnect (BEOL) levels and hence both need to be considered. At sub-28nm
process nodes, as we go down the node, the current density increases and makes the
device increasingly vulnerable to EM. In a FinFET the current density can be
generally 25% more than that in a planar transistor. Also the narrow 3D fin
structure and the lower thermal conductivity of the SiO2 dominated substrate can
cause local heat to get trapped.
With such tough challenges and extremely tight window of accuracy, its critical to
ensure power integrity across the chip, package and board. And an accurate EM
analysis at all levels is a must. There are some key critical enhancements added into
ANSYS tools to provide the kind of accuracy and versatility needed for the EM,
power integrity and reliability solution at 10nm.
To support multi-patterning technology, ANSYS solution provides color-aware
resistance extraction and EM analysis capability. And there is a complete
system-to-block level EM analysis flow with color-aware metal-fill capability that
delivers higher yield and performance along with accurate EM analysis.
To address the increasing difference in the current between signal and power rails,
ANSYS solution provides various approaches to apply appropriate EM rating
factors for signal and power analysis. At 10nm, there can be measurement issue
between the drawn trapezoidal shape and the physical implementation of a wire in
silicon. ANSYS provides a comprehensive wire width adjustment solution to
compensate for the difference that leads to more accurate results in the EM analysis.

ANSYS solution provides thermal-aware EM methodology. Above diagram shows the

Thermal-aware EM Flow at TSMC for the 16nm FF+ process node that uses
RedHawk, Totem and Sentinel-TI. RedHawk/Totem along with Sentinel-TI uses
foundry data to accurately compute the self-heat temperature on an IP or SoC. The
temperature can be analyzed at instance or metal layer basis. A Chip Thermal Model
(CTM) is generated for back-annotation into RedHawk or Totem. This methodology
helps avoiding over-heating of the device, thus increasing its lifetime and reliability.
With increasing complexity and sizes of SoCs at lower nodes, challenge of managing
capacity, performance, and parasitic effects also increases. RedHawk/Totem uses a
novel Distributed Machine Processing (DMP) capability that can handle large power
delivery network (PDN) and perform flat simulation with high performance and
small memory footprint. RedHawk-CPA provides chip-package co-simulation and
co-analysis within a unified environment that ensures integrity of power delivery on
the complete chip and takes into account the impact of package parasitic, thus
avoiding undesired hotspots.
The overall comprehensive solution provided by ANSYS delivers highly accurate
results as needed at 10nm FinFET node and also reduces design turnaround time
through its innovative methodology, algorithms, and multi-physics simulations. The
Power Integrity and EM solutions are ready for 10nm FinFET based early design
start. On earlier technologies, ANSYS solution for SoC/IP power integrity, noise, and
reliability sign-off has been proven on thousands of successful silicon wins.