WILSONVILLE, Ore., September 3, 2013—Mentor Graphics Corp. (NASDAQ: MENT) today announced that Advanced Wireless Semiconductor Company (AWSC) has selected the Calibre® nmDRC™ and nmLVS™ products as their golden signoff physical verification solution for GaAs ICs targeted for mobile and other wireless applications. As part of their foundry offering, AWSC will provide the Calibre design rule decks to its customers to help them ensure their designs are error free and meet all foundry requirements before submitting them to AWSC manufacturing.
“We moved to Calibre for our new offerings to take advantage of its highly efficient commands and unique capabilities not available in other products, such as equation-based DRC, which makes it easier to implement complex design rules for RF applications,” said Louis Lu, manager of product development engineering at AWSC. “Calibre is widely used by our fastest growing customers, and it works seamlessly in any of the design flows our customers use, including the Agilent ADS custom RF design platform. Also very important in our decision is the high level of product support and application knowledge we receive from Mentor.”
“We’re pleased to see the adoption of Calibre for state-of-the-art RF ICs such as those fabricated by AWSC,” said Shu-Wen Chang, director of Calibre Foundry Programs at Mentor Graphics. “AWSC’s adoption of Calibre for advanced GaAs ICs for RF applications is part of a growing worldwide trend to use the most advanced Calibre technologies for larger feature size applications. Our mutual customers are pushing much more complex designs through processes initially developed for simpler geometric data, particularly in mobile applications (e.g. smart phones, tablets, etc.) where AMS/RF processes are increasingly important.”
One example of advanced features being used by AWS is the Calibre nmDRC product’s equation-based DRC (eqDRC) facility, which fills the void between traditional DRC and DFM process simulators. Some design rules are simply too complex to capture with traditional DRC measurements and rule tables. Equation-based DRC allows these rules to be expressed as complex multi-variable equations, enabling precise and accurate characterizations of complex 2D and 3D interactions that have a direct impact on manufacturability. Equation-based DRC brings user extensibility and fast runtimes to a whole host of new design and process interactions. It also provides precise numerical feedback allowing users to make reliable design tradeoffs, and to quickly determine the best fix.
AWSC is a pure foundry service company located in Hsin-shi, Taiwan, which specializes in fabbing Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMIC) fabricated with GaAs HBT, pHEMT/IPD and GaAs/Ge CPV processes for smart phone and WiFi applications.
About Mentor Graphics
Mentor Graphics Corporation is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products, consulting services and award-winning support for the world’s most successful electronic, semiconductor and systems companies. Established in 1981, the company reported revenues in the last fiscal year of nearly $1,090 million. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777. World Wide Web site:http://www.mentor.com/.
