Virtuoso Video Diary: What's New in Reliability Setup

7 May 2019 • 3 minute read

Today's blog highlights the enhancements made to the Reliability Options form and to the overall reliability setup. This blog is a part of the mini blog series that we are posting twice a week—Tuesday and Thursday—to cover the just-released features in Virtuoso®ADE Assembler, Virtuoso®ADE Explorer, and Virtuoso® Visualization and Analysis. Stay tuned for more such interesting blogs.

Have you ever set up options to perform reliability analysis using the Reliability Options form? If yes, you'll agree that the form has too many options to overwhelm you with a sensory overload. But with the revamped Reliability Options form, which we introduced in IC6.1.8/ICADVM18.1 ISR3, you will breathe a sigh of relief.

Wait, we did not remove any of those options. Then, what has changed?

Well, we have reorganized them in aptly-named, collapsible sections on four different tabs, which makes it easy-to-find and easy-to-use, thereby improving the overall usability of the form.

It’s not just the look and feel of the form that has changed, but we have also introduced some new features to the overall reliability setup.

Read through this blog and browse through the videos to acquaint yourself with these enhancements.

Revamped Reliability Options Form

The revamped Reliability Options form has the following four tabs:

Basic: Enables you to specify analysis type, aging options, start and stop time of reliability simulation, and options related to device masking, degradation ratio, and lifetime calculation.
Modeling: Enables you to choose the modeling type you want to use during reliability simulation.
Degradation: Enables you to specify the options to print device and subcircuit degradation information in to a .bt0 file.
Output: Enables you to specify the degradation reports to be generated, and methods to filter degradation results in the reports.

While the Basic and the Output tabs are used by design engineers, the Modeling and the Degradation tabs are primarily used by model developers.

Here's how the revamped form looks like:

To know more about the tabs and options on the Reliability Options form, check out the What's New in Reliability Setup video available on the Cadence Online Support Portal.

Running Self-Heating Analysis in Spectre Native Mode

Earlier, you could run self-heating analysis only in RelXpert simulator mode, but now, you can run it in Spectre native mode too. You just have to select the Self-Heating check box in the Analysis section on the Basic tab of the Reliability Options form to do so.

Copying Reliability Setup

You can now reuse an existing reliability setup by creating its copies where you can make certain modifications and see their effect on the simulation results. Not only does it help you retain the original setup, but saves your time, which you would otherwise have consumed to create a new setup all over again.

Loading Reliability Setup from Other Cellviews

You can also reuse the reliability setup from an ADE L state or a maestro cellview into another reliability setup of your maestro cellview. To do so, use the Load Reliability Settings command from the context-sensitive menu of a reliability setup. The values are copied from the source setup to the existing setup.

Related Resources

About Virtuoso Video Diary

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 email address to receive notifications about our latest Virtuoso Video Diary posts.

Udit Rajput