Cadence Acquires Clear Shape Technologies
David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, 8/16/2007
With the ink barely dry on its design for manufacturing (DFM) acquisition of Invarium Inc., Cadence Design Systems Inc. announced that it is acquiring Clear Shape Technologies Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) to bolster its design-side DFM tools.
Clear Shape has confounded doubters that its design-side approach could successfully move down to the 65 and 45 nm nodes, said Gary Smith, principal analyst at Gary Smith EDA. Also, the company developed an ability to aid designers without divulging the closely guarded process technology secrets of the foundries, he added.
“This is a really good buy for Cadence,” Smith said, particularly as the large fabless companies and foundries have grown confident that the Clear Shape tools could deal with litho variability issues at the leading-edge nodes.
“The Clear Shape models work without giving up the fab’s process secrets. They have figured out how to do that in a secure way, without hackers being able to crack the encryption,” Smith said.
At the 65 and 45 nm generations, designers have realized that rule-based DFM tools are running out of gas, and that model-based approaches with design-side DFM tools are necessary, he added.
Clear Shape’s approach accomplishes both physical and electrical DFM much more quickly than competing solutions, said Atul Sharan, president and CEO of Clear Shape.
Variability causes timing issues in the critical path that can cause 65 nm designs to run more slowly than 90 nm silicon, requiring design-side DFM tools. “The real problem is one of variability between what they design and model and what the designers are seeing in silicon,” Sharan said.
In the past, post-GDSII corrections could be made with resolution enhancement techniques (RETs) and optical proximity correction (OPC). Going forward, design-side DFM with predictive capabilities will be required to make leading-edge silicon match its performance potential, said Mike McAweeney, vice president of marketing for DFM solutions at Cadence.
The Invarium acquisition is focused on optimization of the mask on the manufacturing side, with RET, OPC and post-GDSII analysis to improve yields. Clear Shape operates on the design side, independently of what RET software is being used from Mentor Graphics, Synopsys or Invarium, McAweeney said.
“What our customers appreciate is that Clear Shape already has a level of integration between design and manufacturing, so designers can model those variability effects and bring them into the design. We will talk about that roadmap, bringing Invarium and Clear Shape into products and how they are complementary, at the CDNLive! users conference in a few weeks,” he said.
Sharan said Clear Shape has ~40 employees. He earlier worked at Numerical Technologies, which was acquired by Synopsys, and spent a period of time as a venture capitalist before founding Clear Shape in 2003.
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