Ensuring robust ESD protection in IC designs

ESD protection is more critical than ever for today’s electronic products, which require operational reliability under a wide variety of demanding environments and conditions. Traditional verification methods can’t combine physical and electrical information for accurate analysis of potential ESD conditions in designs and must rely on custom rule decks that require significant time and resources. The Calibre PERC reliability platform uses foundry rule decks to provide efficient, accurate, automated checking of ESD requirements.

Calibre PERC reliability verification provides automated ESD protection checking

With its unique ability to combine physical and electrical information for accurate analysis of potential ESD conditions in designs, the Calibre PERC reliability platform provides efficient, accurate, automated checking of ESD protection requirements, even in complex SoC designs with billions of transistors. The Calibre PERC reliability platform can automatically identify and accurately analyze design topologies in the input schematic or layout design. Effective resistances and current densities along ESD discharge paths can be calculated accurately and quickly, and any errors can be conveniently viewed and debugged in the familiar Calibre results viewing environment, ensuring complete and correct ESD protection for any IC design. Many leading semiconductor foundries now provide Calibre PERC rule decks, eliminating the need for customized rule decks and providing a standardized, repeatable, and efficient reliability verification process capable of verifying the most challenging reliability issues from first schematic, through SoC assembly, to the final layout.