This past week, Si2 released a long-awaited press announcement that was met with various emails and phone calls offering words of “congratulations”, “thanks”, “big milestone”, and “this is a big _____ deal” (actually, I made that last one up, but that was the sentiment!). So what’s the “big deal” about TSMC, Mentor, and Synopsys contributing iDRC to Si2’s DFM Coalition? I’ll explain this in today’s blog.

To begin with, it’s important to realize that passing DRC is an absolute gate to chip production, and therefore company revenue… and that physical verification of today’s complex chips has become harder for multiple reasons. First of all, the chips have more transistors, more layers, and more routes than ever before. Second, many ICs are designed at advanced process nodes where the physical verification rules number in the thousands, with billions of features to be verified on each one. Third, an increasing number of these rules are now design context-dependent, with conditional rule checks and an explosion of DFM concerns that require much more processing to determine which rules apply where. Finally, as if this task weren’t hard enough, these complex and intricate rules often need to be written multiple times in different formats to support multiple EDA tools.

TSMC recognized this growing problem early, and took a leadership role to manage the increasing cost and schedule risks with the concept of a single “meta-language” named iDRC. Working with their EDA partners, TSMC invested in bringing iDRC into full production, and has been very successful with widespread adoption across the industry.

At about the same time, a group of companies under Si2 called the DFM Coalition (DFMC) had been working on physical DFM standards, and had defined nearly 250 DFM parameters ready for inclusion into a new standard. However, rather than create a separate file format for DFM, it was clear that layering standard DFM checks into a DRC language was a far better solution for industry. But how could this be done among the multiple proprietary DRC formats? Fortunately (for all of industry), iDRC was offered as a practical basis for creating an open standard under Si2, which is being called OpenDFM. The members of the DFMC’s Compatibility Working Group, along with Si2 staff, are presently ensuring 100% compatibility with iDRC as OpenDFDM is being readied for imminent release as an official Si2 standard. Because it is so important to get it right the first time, this assurance includes testing with actual EDA vendor tools.

Now, fast-forward to last week, where this contribution was publicly announced. For many in the industry, having an open standard (meaning shared ownership control and community-based evolution) is a huge step for physical DRC, a fundamental prerequisite to chip revenue. It would be very difficult to migrate to OpenDFM if it were not directly compatible with the latest version of iDRC, and now this contribution enables that confidence. That is a big deal.

But that’s not all. In addition, recall that OpenDFM adds numerous standardized DFM checks to the traditional DRC checks. If you care about DFM, that’s just as big a deal. So now this is a double-win.

Yet there is even more value. If you are a foundry (other than TSMC) or you do business with these other foundries, OpenDFM will enable new efficiency savings for both DRC and DFM at the same time, which was not previously possible. Hmm, that’s a really big deal, too.

But wait, I’m not done yet! Since OpenDFM is being extended by the OpenPDK Coalition to handle brand new efficiency requirements to support ‘targeting’ (defined in a specification offered to Si2 by IBM and the ISDA partners), these targeting extensions to OpenDFM will add even more value to anyone working at leading-edge process nodes. Finally, OpenAccess adopters will find the above OpenDFM features (including those that originated in iDRC) will also help with OpenAccess-based flows. In fact, there are planned OpenAccess enhancements that will also help the users of OpenDFM. So this is really a big win – for everyone in industry.