Virtuoso Front-to-Back Workshop Series in Saudi Arabia

Starting Dec. 5^th, 11 PSATRI members attended a five-day workshop on the Cadence Virtuoso front-to-back flow. PSATRI stands for Prince Sultan Advanced Technology Research Institute, which is part of the King Saud University in Riad, Saudi Arabia. Attendees built a sample and hold circuit using a Cadence generic 45nm PDK from scratch and ran simulations with Spectre simulator. They used different Virtuoso Analog Design Environment XL features such as setting specifications for their design, running Monte Carlo and corners. After successful simulation, the attendees generated layout and exercised different back-end features, such as auto-placement ,auto-routing, setting constraints, cloning, etc, using Virtuoso Layout GXL. Finally, they verified that their design was LVS clean and generated an extracted view to use in their post-layout simulation. All 11 attendees have received a certificate for successful participation in the workshop.

King Saud University is one of the oldest universities in Saudi Arabia, founded in 1957 as Riyadh University. PSATRI has four advanced labs: communications and computing networks, electro-photonics and lasers, RF and antennas, and robots and unmanned vehicles. Cadence Academic Network has been working with KSU since April this year, and the provided workshop is only the first step in a promising collaboration between these two parties.