DW Suite

Flexibility: Tailoring to Your Preferences

At the core of DW is the commitment to flexibility, designed to cater to the diverse preferences and styles of power users like you. Whether you prefer a Microsoft-style user interface or were trained on a Calma interface, DW accommodates your preferences. It offers a highly customizable graphical user interface, allowing you to tweak menus, toolbars, shortcut keys, and even craft new dialog boxes from scratch. This customization extends to a robust programming environment provided by DW, enabling almost limitless functionality within your user interface. Experienced designers particularly value this flexibility, and we often receive positive feedback about how DW adapts to various user needs. We are confident that you will find this adaptability a significant asset.

Automation: Enhancing Productivity Through Technology

In the fast-paced world of design, increasing productivity while maintaining quality is paramount. DW introduces automation as a key feature to meet these demands. Through its advanced programming capabilities, you can automate virtually any aspect of your work. The tool supports a powerful P-Cell concept, allowing you to define and rapidly generate design elements with simple parameterization. Whether you input data via the user interface or a script, the system instantaneously creates a device, with ongoing flexibility to adjust parameters as needed. This integration of P-Cells with DW’s Graphical Programming Environment (GPE) transforms the automation process, making it a practical reality for enhancing your design productivity.

Integration: Seamless Collaboration within Design Tools

Effective tool integration within your design workflow is crucial for efficiency. DW ensures a seamless interaction among all its modules through the comprehensive access provided by the GPE, fostering unmatched interoperability. Features include the HLVS module, which can extract circuit representations and emphasize specific nets and devices in layouts. Additionally, the DRC integrates with the Layout Editor to streamline error checking and navigation. For further integration, Advanced GPE Extensions facilitate data exchange via C programs, and P-Cells can be utilized with front-end simulation tools, ensuring that each design element maintains consistent parameters across all tools. This holistic approach is facilitated by partnerships, such as the one with Optiwave Corporation, to ensure smooth transitions from modeling environments to physical layouts, thereby embedding integration deeply into every phase of the design process.

Extendibility: Custom Solutions for Unique Challenges

When standard tools fall short in addressing specific design challenges, DW’s extendibility allows you to enhance its capabilities to meet your unique requirements. The Graphics Programming Environment (GPE) of DW enables users to modify existing modules or develop new functionalities, tailored to their specific design methodologies. This flexibility has led to innovations by users, extending DW in ways previously unimagined. For those requiring assistance, our application services are available to collaborate with your engineers to devise the precise solutions needed, demonstrating our commitment to supporting your specialized design needs.

Modularity: Tailored Tool Selection

The DW suite offers a modular set of engineering design tools, allowing you to select exactly what you need based on your specific objectives. Whether you require a comprehensive tool suite or individual modules, DW provides options ranging from the Layout Editor to Verification Tools and Data Conversion modules. Each module is optimized for specific tasks yet maintains high cohesion with other modules, facilitating a streamlined workflow and minimizing redundant effort. This modular approach not only meets varied design needs but also offers a Viewer version for those who need to review or print layouts, ensuring that DW serves as a versatile solution for your design challenges.

The DW Layout Editor is a high-performance tool designed for the customization and production of analog or mixed-signal IC layouts. Known for its flexibility and quality, it ensures designers are as productive as possible by converting design intent into actual circuit layouts efficiently.

Core Features of DW Layout Editor

• Fully Integrated System: Combines LVS, DRC, and advanced layout editing in one seamless environment.
• Customizable Interface: Users can adjust the tool according to their needs, enhancing the ease of use and reducing the learning curve.
• Advanced Boolean Engine: Supports complex operations on all angle geometries, ensuring designs are ready for manufacturing.
• Hierarchical Database: Manages large volumes of geometrical data efficiently, supporting extensive editing features for hierarchical designs.

Key Capabilities

• GDSII Native Support: Ensures designs are manufactured correctly without additional conversion steps, saving time and reducing error risks.
• Multi-Mode Data Entry System: Allows creation of diverse shapes by combining different digitizing modes, enhancing design flexibility and precision.
• Recursive Command Structure: Improves productivity by allowing commands to be nested or stacked, matching the designer’s workflow.
• P-Cells Automation: Simplifies layout creation through automatic generation of device layouts from user-defined parameters.

Editing Features

• Edit-in-Place and Multi-Context Editing: Facilitates easy navigation and editing within complex hierarchical structures, allowing simultaneous editing across multiple contexts.
• Customization Options: Users can modify menus, toolbars, and shortcut keys, tailoring the interface to their preferences using the GPE scripting language.
• Performance and Accessibility: Quick data access and performance are maintained across platforms, with the system optimized for both imperial and metric units.

Design Efficiency and Quality

• Automatic Layer Generation: Reduces manual input and human error by automatically creating necessary fabrication layers from design models.
• Extensive Command Library: Offers a wide range of commands and mathematical operations for precise layout creation, supported by a robust scripting environment.

The Ultimate Tool for IC Designers

DW Layout Editor stands out as the essential tool for designers needing a comprehensive, customizable, and efficient solution for IC layout design. Its integration of advanced features and user-focused design ensures top-tier performance and quality in the final products.

Design Workshop Technologies’ DW provides comprehensive data conversion modules essential for interfacing with various stages of engineering and design processes. These modules ensure seamless data exchange across multiple formats, enhancing workflow efficiency.

Supported Formats

DW supports a wide range of data formats for optimal compatibility:

• Standard Formats: GDSII, OASIS, MEBES
• CAD Formats: AutoCAD (DXF, DWG)
• Specialized Formats: Cambridge SPD, JEOL-01, JEOL-51, CIF

Key Conversion Modules

GDSII:

• Integral to DW’s hierarchical database.
• Preserves element information, ensuring reliability and cost savings in mask production.

OASIS:

• Produces files significantly smaller than GDSII, up to 50 times less.
• Includes features to eliminate data duplication.

MEBES:

• Converts data into EBEAM readable formats.
• Allows designers to check for distortions and make necessary corrections before mask production.

AutoCAD (DXF, DWG):

• Features a bidirectional translator for converting designs into formats ready for mask manufacturing.

Cambridge SPD:

• Direct conversion from DW to Cambridge SPD for further processing.
• Enables users to verify and correct conversion-induced inaccuracies.

JEOL Conversion Modules

JEOL-01 and JEOL-51:

• Convert data for JEOL equipment with detailed control over manufacturing limits and data modulation.
• Features include error logging and shot rank modulation.

Advanced Features of Conversion Modules

Stream Out:

• Customizable output streams, layer remapping, automatic box-to-boundary conversion.
• Filters output for specific layers and merges structures from external reference libraries.

Stream In:

• Append data to existing structures with control over overwriting.
• Rebuilds hierarchies and filters input for specific layers only.

CIF and Graphics Output

CIF:

• Primarily used in educational settings, converting CIF formatted data into DW library format without output capabilities.

Graphics Output:

• Facilitates the creation of visual representations for interfacing with documentation and presentation tools.

DW’s data conversion modules represent a crucial component for maintaining efficient workflows across diverse design environments, providing robust tools for accurate and effective data translation and management.

Optimize Your Yield with Advanced Verification Software

Design Rule Checking (DRC) is an essential process for both microelectronic and photonic design, ensuring manufacturability and conformance to advanced foundry standards. DW DRC offers a robust physical verification tool ideal for designers working on analog, mixed-signal ICs, and optical components. This tool excels in performance and accuracy on cost-effective platforms, handling complex geometries such as those found in hybrid layout design, reticle design, and mask layout, while identifying errors that other software may overlook.

Our DRC Solution supports a wide range of checks, from basic width and spacing to more intricate rules like bend radii, connectivity issues, and net tracing. This makes it suitable for all major foundries. Its integration with the DW Layout Editor enhances error navigation, featuring color-coded error representation and plain English descriptions, which simplifies error correction directly within the physical layout.

Feature Highlights

• Boolean Engine generated input data (all angle, logic combinations and resize)
• User-defined verification and exception areas
• Single Layer Rule Checks:
• Inside (or width)
• Inclusive Outside (or notch)
• Exclusive Outside (or separation)
• Two Layer Rule Checks:
• Separation
• Inclusion
• Overlap
• Extension
• Edge visibility angle options
• Interface dialog to quickly invoke checks and compose scripts
• DRC commands in GPE format, hence verification through DRC scripts
• DRC scripts easily installed in interface menus
• Legend dialog to facilitate error count, mask and navigation
• Color-coded error representation
• Plain English error representation

An Integral Verification Tool

DW Standard DRC is a core component of the physical layout process, integrated seamlessly rather than as a separate post-layout batch processing operation. The DRC measurement engine performs verification checks based on a sequence of user-defined relationships. A composer is included to help you create verification checks rapidly and interactively. Alternatively, you can use the GPE (Graphics Programming Environment) to create scripts, recording command sequences that the DRC measurement engine can then verify. These scripts can be installed in a DW menu for easy access, streamlining the layout verification process.

Error Navigation

A crucial aspect of any DRC process is efficient error navigation, enabling designers to pinpoint and correct layout errors flagged in DRC reports. DW Standard DRC provides a user-friendly error navigation interface, integrating color-coded markers directly onto error locations within the layout. This system supports automatic zoom on error areas and allows for meaningful labels via scripting, streamlining complex error recognition and correction workflows, such as net tracing and physical verification.

The Graphics Programming Environment (GPE) is pivotal to all DW modules since it is used within our product architecture to link every aspect of DW. Many Layout Editor commands are, in fact, assemblies of basic GPE commands. This modular approach benefits users by allowing them to assemble GPE commands to easily create custom commands, enhancing physical layout and verification processes. These commands can be invoked by typing them or by installing them into the application menus or static menus. In design phases that require repetitive editing, it is often faster and more convenient to write and execute a program consisting of a series of GPE commands, rather than manually repeating the operations.

The GPE was designed to perform powerful tasks while minimizing the amount of code writing needed to create such programs. For applications requiring deeper control, an optional module enables the integration of “C” programs as well as custom Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). Programs created with the GPE can also be saved as objects, protecting the associated Intellectual Property (IP).

Editor and Compiler

Working with the GPE involves writing program scripts (or texts). A text editor is supplied with the GPE, but you can use any editor that produces unformatted ASCII text. The GPE programs are then compiled, meaning that once they are loaded, the original text is no longer needed. Instead, objects (chunks of binary code) are generated and can be either saved or executed. DW supplies a browser to manage the various GPE programs, facilitating the use of structure editors and enhancing the efficiency of layout verification.

Command Line Interpreter

Another important aspect of the GPE is its ability to interpret typed command lines. A command line can be the name of a GPE or user command, or it can be a full expression. For example, you could type: “SCALE (sin 45) * 2”. In this example, the SCALE command would execute and use as a parameter the evaluation of “(sin 45) * 2”. This flexibility allows for advanced layout verification and manipulation through efficient scripting.

Run-Time Library

Programs written in the GPE can be made with an infinite number of combinations. These programs can range from simple sequences of commands to complex constructions involving decisions, calculations, and user interaction. The GPE supplies a rich collection of run-time elements, varying from data query commands to database manipulations. Each supplementary module, such as XDRC and HLVS, supplies its own set of run-time executable elements. This ensures that the environment used to create a simple Layout Editor macro can also support complex DRC verification scripts or layout extraction.

Advanced GPE Extensions

The optional Advanced GPE Extensions are designed for users whose applications require a deeper level of programming and consist of two parts: the C Developer’s Kit and the Dialog Module Interface.

C Developer’s Kit

The C Developer’s Kit is designed for users who want to modify existing C programs or write new ones to take full advantage of the high performance of a combined (DW and C) environment for automatic layout generation. The Kit provides C programs access to a group of GPE commands. The DW C Developer’s Kit contains an Application Programming Interface (API) that serves as an interface between the user’s C executables and the DW kernel. These C executables or Shared Libraries (also known as DLLs on Windows and “code fragments” on the Power PC) can call exported C functions in this API, which in turn access GPE commands that can be used to create the physical layout of an entire integrated circuit. Once loaded into DW, the user’s Shared Libraries can run like any GPE program, making GPE programming and the power of DW immediately accessible to experienced C programmers.

Dialog Module Interface

The Dialog Module interface is a collection of GPE commands that allows you to create GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) from GPE programs. You can create both modal and modeless windows, and each interface window can support buttons, lists, editable and static text fields, pull-down menus, etc. The Dialog module is designed so that dialogs are created at run time rather than compile time, making GPE-defined dialogs look good on any platform. This flexibility saves significant time for interface creators whose GPE applications need to be portable. Like other GPE programs, those containing dialogs can be installed in DW menus or remain resident until called by the user or another GPE program.

GPE Features:

• Application-level programming
• IP protection
• Rich run-time library
• Integrated editor, compiler
• Command Line interpreter
• Access to every part of DW
• Expandable to C functions
• Ability to create cross-platform GUIs

Enhancing IC Layout Verification with DW HLVS

Optimizing your integrated circuit (IC) layout to ensure it performs as intended is crucial in the semiconductor design process. DW offers a robust set of tools, including efficient extraction and Layout Versus Schematic (LVS) capabilities, to help designers validate their IC layouts through comprehensive testing and comparison methods.

The Hierarchical Layout Extractor (HLE) Module

DW’s Hierarchical Layout Extractor (HLE) plays a pivotal role in translating the physical geometry of a circuit layout into an electrical network, or netlist. This module detects and extracts electrical components based on the geometric relationships within the layout, outputting netlists in HSPICE format. It supports a wide array of devices including MOSFETs, BJTs, diodes, capacitors, and resistors, along with user-defined generic devices and parasitics. A significant feature of HLE is its ability to perform hierarchical extractions, allowing designers to define specific nested structures as “leaf cells” in the netlist. This flexibility enables different layout hierarchies from the reference netlist, adapting the extractor for highly specialized tasks. HLE also includes a comprehensive set of GPE commands for detailed control over extraction processes and device manipulation.

The Layout versus Schematic (LVS) Module

The LVS component of DW HLVS is designed to identify and report any discrepancies between the layout-generated netlist and the original schematic netlist. The module provides clear, understandable reports listing mismatches and allows designers to set options and tolerance values to accommodate acceptable differences between the two netlists. Name binding files facilitate the comparison of netlists with non-symmetrical cell representations, enhancing the verification process. This combined functionality helps designers efficiently locate and resolve mismatches, ensuring the accuracy of the layout.

Integrated Features and User Interface

DW HLVS is seamlessly integrated into the DW Graphics Programming Environment (GPE), maintaining the consistent “look and feel” of DW products, which helps reduce the learning curve for new users. The system is highly customizable, allowing the implementation of extraction rules for any technology or application. Key features of the HLVS modules include:

• Extraction Rule Customization: Defined through GPE scripts, accommodating both hierarchical and flat netlist outputs.
• Parasitic Extraction: Automatically identifies and includes parasitics in the netlist.
• Comprehensive Mismatch Reporting: Generates easy-to-understand reports to pinpoint netlist discrepancies.
• Advanced Netlist Support: Compatible with multiple formats including HSPICE, EDIF, and Verilog.
• Flexible Name Binding and Tolerance Settings: Adjusts for non-symmetrical cell representations and minor discrepancies.
• Interactive Navigation: A network navigator enhances the examination of extracted layouts, allowing users to query active elements or highlight specific nets.

DW HLVS not only provides powerful tools for IC layout extraction and verification but also offers an adaptable, user-friendly interface that integrates smoothly with other modules, making it an indispensable asset in the semiconductor design industry.

DW modules are the gateway to advanced features such as enhanced DRC, electrical layout extraction and network comparison. These modules are fully integrated throughout the application and can be accessed extensively through the GPE. This provides an unsurpassed level of inter-operability – an elegant solution to back-end tools needed for creating layouts.

• DCM – Standard Data Conversion Module – a module containing the following converters:
  • MEBES
  • Cambridge SPD
  • JEOL-01
  • JEOL-51
• AutoCAD (DXF, DWG) – Advanced Bidirectional converter for both DXF and native AutoCAD DWG file formats.
• ISI-2800 – Converter for the ISI-2800 laser writer equipment.
• Standard DRC – Design Rule Check – performed on a physical layout that contains irregularly shaped polygons, with user-specified design rules.
• XDRC – Enhanced Design Rule Checker – a physical verification tool that can verify the design rules of the most advanced process technologies.
• HLVS – Hierarchical Layout vs. Schematic Module
  • Hierarchical Layout Extractor – an electrical extractor that translates the physical geometric organization of a circuit layout into an electrical network (or netlist).
  • Layout versus Schematic Comparator – a network comparator that compares a physical layout to a reference electrical network in order to detect physical layout errors.
• PCell Developer Kit
• Photonics Element Library
• Cross-section viewer