Packaging custom checks standardizes and simplifies reliability verification
By Hossam Sarhan, Mentor – A Siemens Business
Using a packaged checks flow lets designers quickly select, configure and run custom reliability checks and check combinations to help design companies achieve today’s demanding time-to-market schedules while ensuring product reliability.
Many of the leading foundries are now providing reliability rule decks that enable design houses to verify selected reliability conditions and structures in IC designs. While these rule decks provide a solid baseline for reliability verification, design houses often supplement these foundry reliability flows with custom checks that address additional reliability requirements based on the unique needs and applications of their designs.
However, with the increasing number of reliability checks for different applications, and the increasing complexity of these checks, creating such custom checks can often require time and effort. Moreover, this process can be even more difficult if the engineer needs to run multiple custom checks on a design.
Fortunately, there’s now another option. Engineers can quickly and easily combine multiple reliability checks into a single run for reliability validation of a design by leveraging the Calibre® PERC™ packaged check framework. This framework contains a database of a company’s well-written, pre-coded custom checks, a user configuration file, and a package manager to help control the process. The engineer can use the configuration file to select multiple checks, then quickly and accurately set parameters for each check based on the needs of the design in verification. The package manager uses this information to access the checks database and create a rule file containing all of the selected checks, properly configured to run on the designated design. By supporting simple selection and configuration of pre-coded checks, the Calibre PERC packaged check framework maximizes ease-of-use and minimizes setup needed.
Design houses can also establish pre-defined subsets of their custom reliability checks to address common reliability requirements, such as level shifter detection, voltage-aware latch-up analysis, electrical overstress, and many more. This simplifies and standardizes the reliability verification process even more, ensuring that all the necessary checks are included for a particular reliability condition.
If you’d like to learn more about the Calibre PERC packaged check framework, and how it can help you improve the consistency and accuracy of your reliability verification, access or download a copy of our white paper: Configurable, easy-to-use, packaged reliability checks.
Still have questions, or just want to get started? Contact a Calibre representative for more information.
