Tower and Cadence unveil 5G and automotive IC reference flow

Update: August 18, 2021

Tower and Cadence unveil 5G and automotive IC reference flow

Tower and Cadence unveil 5G and automotive IC reference flow

Cadence Design Systems and Tower Semiconductor have jointly released a silicon-validated SP4T RF SOI switch reference design flow that uses Cadence’s Virtuoso Design Platform and RF Solution.

The reference design flow provides a faster path to design closure for advanced 5G wireless, wireline infrastructure, and automotive IC product development and leverages a comprehensive set of mixed-signal and RF design, simulation, system analysis and signoff tools that are tuned for Tower’s CMOS, BiCMOS, SOI and Silicon Germanium (SiGe) process technologies. As a consequence, customers will be able to accelerate RF, mmWave and high-performance analogue designs.

“This RF and mmWave full-flow solution has been jointly validated on Tower’s CS18 RF SOI foundry process,” said KT Moore, vice president, product management in the Custom IC & PCB Group at Cadence, “enabling advanced IC design, which meets the requirements of today’s most complex systems.”

Tower’s RF and high-performance analogue design enablement solutions, PDKs and reference flows complement its foundry wireless and wireline process technologies, including the CS18 and TPS65RS for RF-SOI and SBC18 for SiGe BiCMOS. According to Tower RF and mmWave IC and package co-design has been a critical issue for its customers, and they are now armed with silicon-validated tools and flows. Joint customers can design differentiated ICs optimised for cost and performance.

“The expansion of our design enablement capabilities provides our customers with new competitive advantages,” said Mr. Ori Galzur, Tower Semiconductor Vice President of VLSI Design Center and Design Enablement. “Through our long-term collaboration with Cadence, we are able to continuously deliver new and advanced design tools with unique features that best suit IC design requirements in leading markets, providing our customers with fast and accurate design cycle time.”

As frequencies have moved higher, so there is a growing need for accurately incorporating multiphysics effects. As such, the RF and mmWave PDKs available from Tower now incorporate the Cadence Celsius Thermal Solver, EMX Planar 3D Solver and Clarity 3D Solver technologies so as to address the electromagnetic (EM) and thermal integrity of the design.

The multiphysics analysis products complement the existing Cadence toolset in use at Tower, including the Virtuoso environment, Spectre Simulation Platform, Quantus Extraction Solution, integrated Litho Physical Analyzer, and Innovus Implementation System.