Keysight Technologies Inc. has announced that Dialog Semiconductor has adopted the Keysight EEsof EDA Integrated Circuits Characterization and Analysis Program (IC-CAP), Model Builder Program (MBP), Model Quality Assurance (MQA), and WaferPro Express (WaferPro XP) software to perform foundry technology characterization, model validation, model customization, and enhancement.
Dialog provides highly integrated power management, AC/DC, solid state lighting, and Bluetooth Smart wireless technology. The company exploits its own centralized on-wafer test systems to refine foundry technologies, die packages, and tests. An international team spanning multiple locations then uses the characterization results to validate foundry models, and enhance them to meet design-specific needs. This workflow ensures a fast ramp-up to volume manufacturing.
Keysight EDA’s suite of device modeling software products provide an end-to-end solution for Dialog Semiconductor’s characterization and modeling workflow with the following capabilities:
- WaferPro XP performs automated wafer-level measurements of semiconductor devices such as transistors and circuit components. The software provides turnkey drivers and test routines for a variety of instruments and wafer probers
- MBP is used for efficient modification of foundry device models, whereas the open IC-CAP platform provides ultimate flexibility for highly specialized modeling needs
- MQA automatically validates and documents the results, while enabling the rapid qualification and benchmarking of libraries of multiple foundries.
“Introducing Keysight’s modeling and characterization tools has significantly improved and extended our possibilities in extracting, verifying, and fine-tuning foundry models,” said Vivek Bhan, senior vice president of engineering at Dialog. “The combination of ICCAP and MBP allow us to efficiently modify complex simulation models to our needs, while MQA quickly validates the changes, verifies the robustness of new models and generates all required reports and overviews. Together with WaferPro XP’s support for cross wafer mapping capabilities, we now have a useful tool set for ensuring high quality simulation models across our entire product portfolio.”
“The integrated data flow enabled across our device modeling and characterization products, coupled with our embedded on-wafer measurement expertise, make our solutions particularly suitable for cross-functional, cross-site collaboration,” said Roberto Tinti, device modeling planning manager at Keysight EEsof EDA. “We are pleased to see these unique capabilities put to use by industry leading companies like Dialog to achieve fast time-to-market volume manufacturing.”
