Virtuoso Video Diary: Checking EM Compliance Before Creating Layouts

4 Apr 2019 • 2 minute read

Have you ever wished that you could check your designs for electromigration (EM) compliance before creating the layouts? If yes, then there's nothing wrong about that. It would be like checking the results through mock up tests before writing your exam sheets. Sounds weird, but it’s actually possible. After all that’s what mock tests help us do. We take them to check our overall performance, and to identify our strong and weak areas. Based on the results of the mock tests, we prepare to be exam ready.

Similarly, Virtuoso® Electrically Aware Design flow provides pre-layout EM check (or pre-EM check) that you can use to run EM checks on specified layers of Pcells in your design. This helps in identifying and resolving EM violations even before creating the actual circuit layout.

When these checks are run, EAD performs the following steps sequentially:
1. Creates a scratch layout view based on the device parameters in your design
2. Runs EM check on the scratch layout
3. Generates a report that lists EM violations
4. Provides recommendations on how to resolve those violations

This feature is particularly helpful for designs that contain Pcells as the layout engineers do not have much control on them to fix EM violations.

To find more details about this feature, watch the Pre-EM Flow in EAD video available on Cadence Online Support. Click the video link now or visit Cadence Online Support and search for this video under Video Library.

Use this feature and be EM check ready for Pcells in the layout.

Related Resources

For more information on Virtuoso Electrically Aware Design Flow, visit www.cadence.com.

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Virtuoso Video Diary is an online journal that relays information about Virtuoso videos that are available in the Cadence Online Support Video Library. Hundreds of interesting videos on a wide variety of new and exciting Virtuoso features have already been created. Virtuoso Video Diary brings you direct links to these videos and other related material, on regular basis. Click Subscribe to visit the Subscriptions box at the top of the page in which you can submit your e-mail address to receive notifications about our latest Virtuoso Video Diary posts.

Namrata Malhotra