United Monolithic Semiconductors (UMS), which designs and produces RF, microwave and millimeter-wave components and ICs at its facilities in Orsay, France and Ulm, Germany, has made available enhanced process design kits (PDKs) by using the latest product innovations in Agilent Technologies' Advanced Design System (ADS) electronic design automation software.
UMS offers a proven family of III-V semiconductor material based processes for low-noise and high-power monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) for the defense, automotive, space, telecom, and industrial markets.
"Our foundry customers expect an integrated tool flow that addresses their RF and microwave design challenges and enables them to achieve first-time-right designs," says Eric Leclerc, manager of UMS' foundry business department. "By leveraging the latest ADS capabilities in our PDKs, we are providing our mutual customers a greatly enhanced front-to-back MMIC design flow with scalable devices and integrated 3D EM engines with unified stack-up that provide native air-bridge, via hole and dielectric opening descriptions. This further improves design accuracy and efficiency beyond existing capabilities like native design rule check and layout-versus-schematic check," he adds.
"We collaborated with UMS to incorporate advanced electromagnetic analysis, like native air-bridge support, and the latest ADS enhancements in their PDKs," says Juergen Hartung, foundry program manager of Agilent's EEsof EDA division (which supplies EDA software for microwave, RF, high-frequency, high-speed digital, RF system, electronic system-level, circuit, 3D electromagnetic, physical design and device-modeling applications). "With these kits, our customers can now enjoy the industry's most comprehensive multi-technology design platform using Momentum, the industry-leading 3D planar electromagnetic simulator, and our integrated full 3D Finite-Element-Method engine," he adds. "For customers, that means increased performance, consistency, and yield."
The updated PDKs work seamlessly with ADS 2012.08 and ADS 2013.06. All PDKs support a complete ADS front-to-back MMIC design flow, including schematic-driven layout creation, layout-versus-schematic, design rule check, and integrated 3D planar and finite-element method electromagnetic simulation.