Services

Design service

Imec’s design support service helps you develop first-time right ASICs.

We can help you with deep sub-micron design, overcoming common pitfalls that can cause your circuits to fail: clock-skew, latency of interacting clocks, IR-drop on the power mesh, electro-migration problems, the growing importance of interconnect delays, crosstalk, on-chip variation, the many metal interconnect layers, the growing importance of low power design methods …

Imec has already taped out, or provided design services, for numeruous ICs, in processes from more than 10 different foundries, for both SoCs developed in-house and ASICs developed by design houses, companies, research institutes and universities. Many of these systems combine analog full-custom blocks with digital units including macros (e.g. RAM, ROM, …).

Imec’s design support services are:

  • Based on state-of-the art Synopsys Galaxy and Cadence Encounter platforms

  • Offer full support for design flows
    • Specification to RTL
    • Analog full-custom design
    • RTL simulation, synthesis and formal verification
    • Design for test (DFT) and Automatic Test-Pattern Generation (ATPG)
    • Gated clock-tree synthesis
    • Floorplanning, Placement, and Routing
    • Multi-Supply Voltage (MSV)
    • In-Place Optimization and ECO iterations
    • Static Timing Analysis (also including on-chip variation and crosstalk)
    • Parasitic extraction
    • Tape-out checks: DRC, ERC, LVS …
    • Physical and formal verification
    • Tape-out preparation

  • Offer services at these entry points in the design flow:
    • Specification
    • RTL (our customer writes the RTL code)
    • Netlist (our customer does the synthesis)
    • Placed netlist (our customer does the physical synthesis)
    • GDSII (our customer does the layout)
  • Imec has extensive expertise in radiation-hardened IC design (e.g. the in-house developed DARE library)