Signal Integrity Tool Takes Integrated Circuit Package Parasitic Extraction to the Next Level

Fluent Inc., the world leader in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, announces the release of Icemax, the newest addition to Fluent’s design suite of products for the electronics industry. Icemax joins Icepak, the leading electronics thermal design tool, IcePro, the mechanical CAD interface to Icepak, and Qfin, the heat sink design and optimization tool, complimenting the successful suite of products.

Developed specifically to address the signal integrity issues in today’s high-speed Integrated Circuit (IC) package designs, Icemax provides substrate designers and electrical analysts with an easy-to-use and highly automated modeling environment, seamlessly integrated with CAD data from major EDA layout vendors. Icemax is powered by advanced geometry processing engines and Fluent’s flagship finite volume 3-D field solver, thereby facilitating quick and accurate parasitic extraction of complex (IC) package layouts.

“We have developed Icemax to address a major area of concern for our customers in the semiconductor industry. With tools available in the market today, it is just too difficult and time-consuming to characterize high pin-count BGA packages,” says Rajesh Nair, Fluent’s Product Manager for Icemax. “With Icemax, engineers can now turn around full IC package analysis quickly to efficiently support the chip design process – what used to take days can be accomplished in a matter of hours. For example, full package extraction of a 300-net BGA package takes only 30 minutes on a 2 GHz Pentium PC.” Complex ground/power nets can be solved with relative ease in Icemax by using extremely efficient meshing and solution algorithms.

Bret Zahn, Vice President of Chippac Inc. states, "We, at Chippac Inc. have been very impressed with the performance of Icemax compared to our current tools. We are dramatically overloaded with large electrical models and needed a tool that could perform characterization runs faster (i.e. hours instead of days). Using Icemax, we were able to cut down the simulation times by a factor of five or more, without sacrificing accuracy. It has been possible to perform full package extractions for our multichip packages, including complicated Ground/Power nets, in a reasonable amount of time."

The Icemax graphical user interface (GUI) is tailored for the demands of the design environment in terms of intuitiveness, responsiveness, and usefulness to the IC package designer. The Icemax GUI is designed to automatically import package layouts from EDA software, specify the relevant inputs for RLC extraction, and generate reports and outputs in standard SPICE, IBIS, and ASCII table format. Chip designers can directly use this output to study signal and power integrity effects such as crosstalk, timing delay, ground bounce, simultaneous switching noise etc.

About Fluent

Fluent is the world's largest provider of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software and consulting services. Fluent's software is used for simulation, visualization, and analysis of fluid flow, heat and mass transfer, and chemical reactions. It is a vital part of the computer-aided engineering (CAE) process for companies around the world and is deployed in nearly every manufacturing industry. Using Fluent's software, product development, design and research engineers build virtual prototypes and simulate the performance of proposed and existing designs, allowing them to improve design quality while reducing cost and speeding time to market. Fluent's corporate headquarters is located in Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA, with offices in Belgium, England, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and Sweden. Its CFD software is also available around the world through joint ventures, partnerships, and distributors in Korea, Australia, Brazil, China, Taiwan, the Czech Republic, Middle East, and most European countries.

For more information, contact: Jennifer Correa, Fluent Inc., 10 Cavendish Court, Lebanon, NH 03766, 800-445-4454 Ext. 668, jrc@fluent.com