Technologies for computer aided design
Electrothermal simuator
In order to be able to meet the ever growing requirements in IT and mobile devices, the IC manufacturers gradually turn to 3D integration, which consists in stacking chips in order to form complex single-package systems. Such an approach allows to look into the opportunity of new solutions to stick to Moore's law or evening achieve "more than Moore" performance, but it also come with several shortcomings. In particular, evacuating the heat produced within an integrated chip is particularly difficult and induces an increase of the average operating temperature and also hotter spots. Besides being responsible for higher power consumption, these thermal issues also have negative impact on chips' reliability. As it is the aging mechanisms that occur in integrated circuits (electromigration NBTI,...) are all the more important with high temperature. In order to minimize these harmful effects, it has now become essential to take thermal characteristics at the early stage of IC development.
In that context, since 2009 we have been working on the development of an electrothermal simulator, embedded into one of industry's standard CAD tool, namely CADENCE®. Now, our team is in possession of an experimentally validated operational tool dedicated to simulating electrothermal behavior in the IC engineering flow. This enables high accuracy circuit behavior simulation and should ultimately allow accurate forecasting of an integrated system's lifetime, i.e. prior to failure.
Computer aided conception tools
The integrating of ever more complex systems requires adapted conception tools and methods. Indeed, functional and technological constraints are constantly increasing with ever smaller tolerance and shorter time-to-market. In order to meet these constraints, the typical approaches need be revised and adapted, taking complementary concepts into account such as increased formalism, reuse and capitalization of knowledge bases. Therefore, we develop new conception approaches dedicated to multidisciplinary systems using formal specification and hardware description languages. This is done by extending the use of applied mathematics developed for other purposes, such as for instance interval arithmetic.