Catch, Correct, and Prevent Common Package Design Errors with the 16.6 Cadence APD/SiP Integrity Check Tools

Designing an IC package substrate is a complex task. From picking the right materials and substrate cross-section to configuring your design rule constraints and identifying your voltage nets, it can be easy to make a mistake no matter how careful you are. We are humans, after all.

Not all of these changes are obvious errors, either. Picking the wrong JEDEC package may be obvious after you place your die and see their relative sizes. Failing to identify a power or ground net can be far less noticeable until you try to route the net and the system seems sluggish or shows the wrong padstacks available for your vias.

Enter the Package Design Integrity Checker tool. Available in all Cadence APD and SiP package layout tools, this command scans your active drawing looking for common problems that may exist. These checks encompass a broad range of frequent setup errors: from unidentified voltage nets which will impact your routing and SI extraction performance, to bond wires that are not connected to a finger or pin on both ends, and even to missing dielectrics in your cross-section. These checks complement and extend the database doctor command, which searches strictly for database problems and not configuration problems.

Read on to learn more about how this command can help you catch errors earlier, fix them faster, and even prevent you from encountering them in the future.

The Package Design Integrity Checks Finds Configuration Problems Faster

The Package Design Integrity Checks, as we mentioned early, are there to help you find and fix problems that may not be obvious to you from looking at your design, but which can cause commands to behave strangely - sometimes even inaccurately - because the design data doesn't match your intentions.

When you open the command, the interface below is shown. The checks are broken into various categories so that, if you're having a problem with a specific area of the tool (e.g. your SI extraction is taking forever or giving you obviously incorrect outputs), you can choose to run just the checks for that category. Or, if you want to run a general health check-up on your design, run all the rules. Whatever you pick, you have the choice of having the tool write the results to a log file or create DRC markers into the design for you to see and correct.

For many rules, the tool can even correct the problems automatically for you. If a via is slightly offset from the origin of the BGA ball it connects to, the tool can shift it to the right location, stretching any cline connections to maintain connectivity. It is, however, always advisable that you run the checks in check-only mode first to verify that the changes it finds are not something you did intentionally.

Whatever checks you opt to run, you can get a detailed description directly in the UI (and in the log file, alongside all the rule violations found) describing the problem, what kind of problems it can lead to in the course of your package design flow, and the most common ways the problem can be created. In this way, not only can you fix your design in the minimum amount of time, you will know what you need to do earlier in your flow to prevent the problem in future designs.

Did You Know...

If you have an idea for an Integrity Check rule that is a common error at your company and for the design community in general, let your customer support representative know. Or, consider posting about it in the public IC Packaging forums and see what your peers think.

But, if you have your own internal checks and rules that are proprietary knowledge for your company, you can still integrate those checks directly into the Package Integrity UI and infrastructure! Cadence provides a public Skill API to add your own custom categories and rules to the Checker so your specific conditions can be verified in the very same way as the core Cadence-provided functionality.

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