ACADEMIA

New Release Offers Key New Features to Simplify Design Flow of Next Generation 3-D Packaging Technologies: ANSYS, a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, today announced the release of version 3.0 of its ANSYS Icemax software for circuit extraction of advanced integrated circuit (IC) package designs. This new release provides IC package designers with a flexible modeling environment, to set up and analyze a wide range of system-in-package designs, including package-on-package, package-in-package and package-on-PCB structures. ANSYS Icemax technologies are now part of the ANSYS suite, from the company's 2006 acquisition of Fluent Inc. The release aligns with the ANSYS focus on powerful industry solutions, based on the Company's commitment to Simulation Driven Product Development. The ANSYS Icemax user interface allows users to import multiple designs within the same model, use automatic alignment tools and analyze the assembled design as a unified structure. "Stacked packages are becoming increasingly common, especially in the handheld and wireless space. Existing design flows in most semiconductor companies are set up to analyze individual layouts separately and then connect them up in the system-level electrical model. For 3-D stacked packages, and in general system-in-package designs, this approach has obvious limitations," says Chetan Desai, ANSYS Icemax product manager. "The electrical model has to be extracted by accounting for all possible interactions within the 3-D package assembly at the field solver level. Appropriate return paths across package interfaces have to be accurately detected for generating the final equivalent circuit. ANSYS Icemax 3.0 technology helps engineers realize this objective." The software enhancements are complemented by additional optimizations of core meshing and field solver technologies that have been integral to earlier product releases. Improvements have been made to simplify the specification and detection of return paths in the package and PCB. Batch processing is a major new addition to the solver, providing further automation in the design flow. ANSYS Icemax 3.0 software will continue to operate on multi-CPU machines as well as 64-bit Windows and Linux platforms, helping customers easily analyze high pin-count packages with complex power and ground structures. New visualization capabilities include custom widgets for layer-by-layer model display and finite volume mesh display. Other key enhancements include analysis of lossy dielectrics and specification of user-defined terminals in the ANSYS Icemax model. In addition to RLCG data, results can now be exported in the form of S/Y/Z parameters in industry standard touchstone format.