Interview: Virtuoso Passive Component Designer now supports synthesis for customer Pcells Bo Wan Cadence Design Systems Discuss this content or topic in the Custom IC forums Interview with Bo Wan, Cadence VPCD Engineering Manager Virtuoso Passive Component Designer provides a complete flow for the design, analysis and modeling of inductors, transformers and transmission lines. In this cdnusers interview, Bo Wan, VPCD Engineering Manager, briefly discusses the most important features. cdnusers: Bo, tell us about your background working with the Virtuoso Passive Component Designer technology I have been in R&D for the Virtuoso Passive Component Designer since we started the project in 2004. Along with my colleagues, we have been working very hard to make this project successful in the past three years. Now Virtuoso Passive Component Designer has been released as a standard product and we have customers from all over the world using the technology. We have two employees in the U.S. and three more in China. We worked together and did a great job. cdnusers: What is the one new thing designers should know about this technology? Support for customer parameterized cells (Pcells). This new technology is being developed to give Virtuoso Passive Component Designer an exciting capability to support synthesis for customer Pcells. Virtuoso Passive Component Designer can provide a set of standard passive component Pcells for inductor, transformer and transmission line design. These Pcells can satisfy most of the design requirements. However, most of the major design houses have their own Pcells since either they have specific requirement for their process, or they have specific inventions that they don’t want to expose to others. Customers lack the synthesis and modeling tool for their own Pcells. cdnusers: Tell us how this feature works. The quasi-static solver and full-wave EM solver in Virtuoso Passive Component Designer have been greatly enhanced to handle layout geometry information in DFII database. Synthesis process is indeed an optimization process, which involves a lot of evaluations for difference instances of the Pcell. In each evaluation step, Virtuoso Passive Component Designer synthesizes first instances customer Pcells in DFII, reads in the geometry and port information, meshes the geometry based on the solver configuration, then feeds meshed results into core solvers for simulation. cdnusers: Now tell us about a couple more features that users will find helpful. Virtuoso Passive Component Designer users will be excited to see two recently developed features: Dynamic sweeping and submicron process support. Dynamic sweeping provides fast and reliable interpolation between frequency points so that some points could be skipped safely without loss of accuracy. Users want to see a 2x speed up in a typical EM simulation. Submicron process (<90nm) has some challenges for EM solver, such as Bias and Erosion, Metal fills and slotting, etc. Without taking these effects into account, EM solver could hardly get accurate result. cdnusers: Now some personal questions. How do you concentrate when working? Any tricks? I can easily focus on one thing if I want. My trick is to make a to-do list every day, concentrate on one thing at one time, and ignore distractions. cdnusers: Where do you do your best thinking? At home. I do my best thinking most of the time at night, when my son goes to bed. That is my golden time for thinking. cdnusers: What do you do after a long day or week of working on custom design problems to relieve your stress levels? Regular exercise. I play badminton twice a week and go hiking with my family and friends on the weekends. I also go to fitness center in building 9 regularly. I benefit from exercise a lot, both for the mind and body. Summary About the author Bo Wan joined Cadence after obtaining a Ph.D degree in EE from University of Washington, Seattle in June 2004. Prior to that he worked at MIS center of Civil Aviation Administration of China for 4 yours and had responsibility of leading a 30-person software development team. After joining Cadence, he has developed his expertise in Virtuoso flow, synthesis, RF and EM simulation. Bo is a key contributor and product manager to VPCD project. VPCD plugged a big hole in Cadence RF simulation flow and contributed to SpectreRF's honor of making to the finalists of Cadence 2005 product innovation award. Bo has published more than 15 Journal and conference papers and one patent pending. . Ratings   This content has not yet been rated by other users   Comments