Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Fluent | Subject: Icemax
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 31 December 2003
Signal integrity tool solves IC package
parasitics
Developed to address signal integrity issues in today's high-speed IC package designs, Icemax provides substrate designers and electrical analysts with a simple highly automated modelling environment.
Icemax is the newest addition to Fluent's design suite of products for the electronics industry Icemax joins Icepak, the leading electronics thermal design tool, IcePro, the mechanical CAD interface to Icepak, and Qfin, the heatsink design and optimisation tool, complimenting the successful suite of products
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 8 Mar 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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Software advances IC package design
Release provides IC package designers with a flexible modelling environment to set up and analyse a wide range of system-in-package designs.
Package analysis expands to next-generation ICs
Fluent has released a new version of its Icemax software, claimed to be the world's fastest circuit extraction tool for analysing advanced IC package designs.
Developed specifically to address the signal integrity issues in today's high-speed IC package designs, Icemax provides substrate designers and electrical analysts with an easy-to-use and highly automated modelling environment, seamlessly integrated with CAD data from major EDA layout vendors.
Icemax is powered by advanced geometry processing engines and Fluent's flagship finite volume 3D field solver, thereby facilitating quick and accurate parasitic extraction of complex IC package layouts.
"We have developed Icemax to address a major area of concern for our customers in the semiconductor industry.
Further reading
Circuit extraction tool upgraded
Icemax 2.1 is a major new update to the tool, targeted specifically toward providing a more integrated design flow for customers using Cadence's Allegro Package Design environment.
Software tackles complex IC package layouts
The second major release of the Icemax IC electrical modelling software package includes a range of new capabilities and enhancements.
With tools available in the market today, it is just too difficult and time-consuming to characterise high pin-count BGA packages", says Rajesh Nair, Fluent's Product Manager for Icemax.
"With Icemax, engineers can now turn around full IC package analysis quickly to efficiently support the chip design process - what used to take days can be accomplished in a matter of hours.
For example, full package extraction of a 300-net BGA package takes only 30min on a 2GHz Pentium PC".
Complex ground/power nets can be solved with relative ease in Icemax by using extremely efficient meshing and solution algorithms.
Bret Zahn, Vice President of Chippac states: "We at Chippac have been very impressed with the performance of Icemax compared to our current tools.
We are dramatically overloaded with large electrical models and needed a tool that could perform characterisation runs faster (ie hours instead of days).
Using Icemax, we were able to cut down the simulation times by a factor of five or more, without sacrificing accuracy.
It has been possible to perform full package extractions for our multichip packages, including complicated ground/power nets, in a reasonable amount of time".
The Icemax graphical user interface (GUI) is tailored for the demands of the design environment in terms of intuitiveness, responsiveness, and usefulness to the IC package designer.
The Icemax GUI is designed to automatically import package layouts from EDA software, specify the relevant inputs for RLC extraction, and generate reports and outputs in standard Spice, Ibis, and ASCII table format.
Chip designers can directly use this output to study signal and power integrity effects such as crosstalk, timing delay, ground bounce, simultaneous switching noise etc.
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