Power Transistor Modeler Reduces Time to Market
Magwel announced that TowerJazz has evaluated and qualified Magwel’s Power Transistor Modeling tool (PTM). TowerJazz is now providing PTM techfiles to facilitate customer use of PTM in its flow for designing power transistors. PTM is used by engineers and circuit designers building converter circuits such as dc-dc converters, switching power supplies and a wide variety of power management chips.
Working with Magwel, TowerJazz performed thorough silicon based measurement correlation using PTM. PTM results are extremely close to silicon, offering customers the ability to predict and optimize device performance before tape-out, reducing time to market. IoT, mobile, automotive and wearable applications are accelerating the demand for all types of power management integrated circuits (PMICs) and converter chips.
PTM takes the guess-work out of predicting Rdson prior to tape out. PTM also reports and visualizes current density and voltage drop produced by 3D current flows. PTM users can easily and fully explore design alternatives to shave precious milliohms off of their Rdson specification, avoid EM or IR drop issues and improve device reliability.
Magwel PTM works in any custom layout flow. PTM reports and displays current densities and electro-migration rule violations on the layout. Current density and voltage distributions can be viewed in 2D or 1D cross-cut formats.
TowerJazz’s 0.18um power management platform covers a wide range of applications with devices ranging from 5 to 700V, starting with a 5~60V BCD process featuring state of the art low Rdson LDMOS, continuing with a 200V SOI process and 450V to 750V transistors on the upper end. The PDK includes unique scalable voltage LDMOS devices accompanied by a rich CMOS and analog device portfolio needed in today's complex PMIC designs.
“Working with TowerJazz has shown us their willingness to expend the extra effort to ensure that their customers’ finished silicon is best in class,” said Dündar Dumlugöl, Magwel CEO. “Cooperation between tool vendors and customer foundries is the key to superior results with these designs.”
PTM is part of a comprehensive family of tools available from Magwel for modeling all aspects of power transistor behavior and performance.
PTM-TR – Transient; PTM-TR uses intrinsic device models in conjunction with its 3D extractor to produce Fast3D models that allow cosimulation with Virtuoso ADE and Spectre to provide a complete picture of dynamic switching behavior in converter circuits.
PTM-ET – Electro-Thermal; PTM-ET combines joule heating with other heat sources and sinks to determine device thermal behavior over time. PTM-ET concurrently and dynamically models devices in their packaging together with the PCB, using stimulus to provide an accurate picture during circuit operation over time.
