SAN JOSE, California and HSINCHU, Taiwan–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CDNS) and United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE: UMC; TWSE: 2303) (UMC) announced today that customers are adopting their certified mmWave reference stream and experiencing exceptional results. As proof, joint customer Gear Radio Electronics, Asia’s leading RF IP design firm, successfully built a first-pass low-noise amplifier (LNA) integrated circuit leveraging UMC and Cadence’s 28HPC+ process technology.® RF solution.
UMC’s production-proven 28HPC+ solution is ideal for high-speed mmWave devices and offers accurate silicon designs for circuit applications up to 110GHz, such as Gear Radio’s LNA design. Cadence virtuoso® The RF solution, incorporating multiple electromagnetic (EM) solutions, enabled Gear Radio to achieve accurate silicon results. Specifically, Gear Radio used Cadence EMX® Planar 3D Solver, the industry’s gold standard electromagnetic simulator, to accurately model your CMOS design. This resulted in significantly faster turnaround time between schematic design and post-layout simulation and verification.
As a result, Gear Radio achieved a first-pass, silicon-accurate design faster than the previous design flow. When Gear Radio compared the simulations with measured silicon results for the 60 GHz LNA, values such as S21 the peak frequency, S21 peak value and noise figure (NF) were in the mid-single digit range.
The certified mmWave reference stream provides several capabilities through Cadence tools, including:
- Capturing and simulating the design via Virtuoso Schematic Editor, Virtuoso ADE Explorer and Assembler, Spectre® X Simulator, Specter AMS Designer and the Specter RF option
- Implementation of the layout through Virtuoso Layout Suite and Pegasus™ Verification System (PVS)
- Parasitic Extraction of Interconnections at the Transistor Level through Quantus™ Extraction solution
- Electromagnetic analysis of transistor interconnects, including passive RF structures through EMX 3D Planar Solver
“Working closely with UMC, we have enabled Gear Radio to achieve excellent results with our mmWave-certified stream, which includes our industry-leading Virtuoso RF solution with the EMX 3D planar solution,” said Ben Gu, VP, R&D, Multiphysics. System analysis at Cadence. “Furthermore, the Cadence foundry team has put in incredible effort to ensure that our innovative workflow, when implemented with UMC’s 28nm process, adds tremendous value to customers like Gear Radio. While this is Gear Radio’s first demonstrated silicon design, we look forward to working together on many more successful projects.”
“Simulating electromagnetic patterns from EMX along with parasitic extraction information from the Cadence Quantus Extraction Solution, combined into one unified cell view within the Virtuoso RF solution, made post-layout simulations much more efficient,” said Gear CEO BJ Kuo. Radio electronics. “Furthermore, the silicon data demonstrated the accuracy proven with UMC’s mmWave models and the Cadence RF solution.”
“The comprehensive mmWave reference flow we’ve developed with Cadence makes RF design faster and easier, and that’s evident in customer successes like Gear Radio,” said Osbert Cheng, vice president of device technology development and design assistance at UMC. “Our collaboration with Cadence has allowed Gear Radio to create a precise and innovative LNA design where Gear Radio’s silicon data closely matches our designs. We look forward to seeing even more customer successes with our mmWave platform.”
Cadence RF solutions support Cadence Intelligent System Design™ Strategy, enabling excellence in SoC design. Please visit www.cadence.com/go/rfsols28 to learn more about Cadence RF solutions. For more on the UMC 28HPC+ process technology, please visit www.umc.com/en/Product/technologies/Detail/28nm.
About Cadence
Cadence is an essential leader in electronic systems design, drawing on more than 30 years of computational software experience. The company applies its core strategy of designing intelligent systems to deliver software, hardware and IP that turn design concepts into reality. Cadence’s customers are the world’s most innovative companies, delivering extraordinary electronics products from chip-to-board to complete systems for the most dynamic applications on the market, including large-scale computing, 5G communications, automotive, mobile, aerospace, consumer, industrial and healthcare. For eight years in a row, Fortune magazine has named Cadence one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Learn more at cadence.com.
About UMC
UMC (NYSE: UMC, TWSE: 2303) is a leading global semiconductor foundry company. The company provides high-quality IC manufacturing services, focusing on logic and various specialty technologies to serve all major sectors of the electronics industry. UMC’s comprehensive IC processing technologies and manufacturing solutions include logic/mixed signal, embedded high voltage, embedded non-volatile memory, RFSOI and BCD, etc. Taiwan, with additional ones throughout Asia. UMC has a total of 12 factories in production with a combined capacity of over 800,000 wafers per month (8 inch equivalent) and all are certified to the IATF 16949 automotive quality standard. UMC is headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, plus local offices in the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Korea and Singapore, with a total of 20,000 employees worldwide. For more information, please visit: https://www.umc.com.
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