ProPlus Offers NanoYield for Advanced DFY Analysis

ProPlus Design Solutions, a provider of Design For Yield (DFY) solutions for semiconductor engineers doing circuit design, has released NanoYield, a software package that provides sophisticated statistical analysis for predicting and analyzing behavior of analog and digital circuits.

“The addition of NanoYield rounds out our product portfolio, solidifying our position as the only company to offer device modeling, SPICE simulation and DFY analysis integrated into one tool suite,” Zhihong Liu, executive chairman of ProPlus Design Solutions, said. “We are the only company to offer all three solutions.”

All of this fancy math is necessary because the performance of actual circuits on silicon varies. The statistical analysis is necessary to reduce errors and release more integrated circuits free of errors, especially as more components are squeezed tighter and tighter on silicon.

NanoYield is based on the NanoSPICE simulator, which allows engineers to simulate how their designs will perform before a single piece of silicon is etched. The Monte Carlo Pro uses the Monte Carlo method to repeatedly simulate a design to predict where and how often it will fail. The High Sigma Pro option will allow engineers to use 5-6 Sigma analysis to produce reliable designs.

Engineers input their designs with statistical models into NanoYield to calculate process, voltage and temperature. NanoYield runs Monte Carlo simulations and calculates estimated yield, output distributions and failures.

The software will also give suggestions as to how engineers can improve their designs. It is also compatible with HSPICE from Synopsis (News - Alert) and Cadence Virtuoso’s Spectre package.

Armed with information on the performance of their designs, engineers can go back and make changes and repeat the process until they hit their yield targets.

NanoYield can take input from the command line, Cadence Virtuoso Analog Design Environment or NanoExplorer, a package for designing and analyzing circuits and models.

The company was granted a patent for "model implementation on GPU” earlier this year.

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