NIRMAAN

Nirmaan is a unique software development toolkit for EDA tool developers for accelerating the development of optimized Post-Layout EDA tools, including DFM/DFY tools. At sub-90 nanometer geometries, the Post-Layout tool development challenges include handling of huge layout and mask data in excess of 100 GBs and performing complex geometrical operations accurately in a fast and robust manner. Nirmaan is first of its kind, versatile software development toolkit that addresses this challenge and lets you develop Customized Post-Layout EDA solutions. Nirmaan includes efficient and scaleable geometric database and a host of fast geometrical operations commonly required for developing a whole range of Post-Layout EDA tools. Native interfaces are provided to most of the major industry standard Layout and Mask data formats and the other formats are going to be supported in near future.

Nirmaan enables Corporate CAD groups in semiconductor companies and EDA startups to cut-down their Post-Layout Tool development time and effort by 60%. Currently, the only alternative for Post-Layout EDA tool developers is to develop their own geometric database and geometrical operations along with the standard input and output format interfaces as part of their EDA tool development. Nirmaan is the first offering in the market that provides a ready-made, performance tuned and customizable infrastructural platform for these developers. Moreover, Nirmaan’s innovative developer licensing model allows use of derivative Post-Layout tools royalty free, thus reducing Total Cost of ownership of EDA tools.

Key Benefits

1. Versatile Software Development Toolkit lets you develop Customized Post-Layout EDA Solutions

2. Ready-made common infrastructure cuts down Post-Layout tool development time by 60%

3. Efficient, Scaleable and Persistent Geometric Database easily handles over 100GBs of polygonal data

4. Host of Built-in, Fast and Memory-efficient Geometrical operations

5. Native Interfaces with all major industry layout and mask data standards, including GDSII, OASIS, MEBES, OASIS.VSB and OpenAccess (more to come)

6. Re-usable platform for a range of Post-Layout tools including Rule Checking, MDP, RET, Inspection and DFM/DFY tools

7. Custom Virtual Memory Management to optimally handle Disk I/O

8. Unique Hybrid Data Organization that combines the best features of Flat and Hierarchical Processing

9. First of its kind C++ API access to infrastructure lets you create your own custom tool binaries

10. Easy to use TCL API allows you to build prototypes of your custom tools quickly

11. Sample demo applications built using Nirmaan’s C++ API along with their source code would act as ready guide to the tool developers

12. Innovative business model of Developer based licensing lets you use your own custom developed tools without any royalty

High Performance Geomterical Processing

Nirmaan is designed keeping in mind the existing and emerging performance challenges associated with processing huge IC layout and mask data of sub-90 nm regime.

• Nirmaan stores and represents geometric data in three organizational levels – Structural, Spatial and Raw Geometry level. At Structural level, Nirmaan has the capability to configure and store geometrical data in Flat, Hierarchical or Hybrid (a unique partially flattened data organization) modes. SoftJin’s Hybrid data organization resembles Flat data organization in terms of its spatial properties and is thus well suited for parallelization. At the same time, it is closer to Hierarchical organization in exploiting the hierarchy of the data for efficient computation and reduced data size.

• Recognizing that the key performance bottleneck is not just computation but also the disk I/O associated with the reading/writing and the virtual memory involved during the data intensive operations, Nirmaan includes a variety of techniques including proprietary Virtual Memory Management (to optimize Disk I/O and reduce Thrashing), Cache-centric Algorithms for data processing and techniques for output file size reduction.

• As an underlying infrastructure, Nirmaan can also be used to develop Distributed Computing and Multi-threaded Post-Layout Applications.

Unprecedented Flexibility

The key to Nirmaan’s usability is the unprecedented flexibility it provides to Post-Layout EDA developers to create custom solutions of their choice.

• A host of fast and memory efficient geometrical operations that are commonly needed for a range of Post-Layout tools are included in the toolkit. These include all the commonly used Boolean, Rule Checking, Resizing, Window Querying operations. These operations work on Nirmaan’s internal database and can be performed at polygon, cell, window and layer levels. These operations support Manhattan, Octangular as well as all-angle layout geometries.

• At a lower level, a collection of operations are provided to directly access, traverse and manipulate the Nirmaan Database.

• All the geometrical operations including Database access are exposed to developers through C++ API functions. Developers can write their own custom application using these API functions and link Nirmaan’s object code libraries to create a single executable for the derivative tool.

• For ease of quick prototyping or instant end-use of Nirmaan’s functionality, a TCL based command line interface (Nsh) is also available as a licensable option.

• Most of the major industry standard Layout and Mask formats are natively supported, thus freeing developer resources from developing these interfaces. Other formats are going to be natively supported in near future.

For further information, please contact us at sales@softjin.com. You could also call us at (408) 773-1714 in the US or 91-80-41779999 in India.