Jul 27 2010
Foveon Inc., a company that designs and develops image capture systems and image sensors, has taped out its latest direct image sensor utilizing the Galaxy Custom Designer solution of Synopsys, Inc., a company that provides IP and software for semiconductor verification, design and manufacturing.
SD15 digital SLR camera
Utilized in high-end consumer cameras including the SD15 digital SLR camera of Sigma, the Foveon X3 direct image sensor has more than 14 million pixels and is executed on a 180-nm CMOS die. Foveon selected the Galaxy Custom Designer solution of Synopsys to replace its present solution in order to speed up time-to-tapeout.
The overall time taken to fully transition to tape out and Galaxy Custom Designer stood below two months. Moreover, this effort also included developing an interoperable process design kit (iPDK), verifying the layout with respect to the legacy design database as well as simulating to check the migrated schematic’s accuracy.
The custom solution of Synopsys meant for front-end simulation and design comprises Custom WaveView waveform analyzer, CustomSim FastSPICE simulator, HSPICE circuit simulator and Custom Designer Schematic Editor (SE) along with analysis and simulation environment. The custom physical verification and design flow of Synopsys comprises StarRC parasitic extraction tool, IC Validator physical verification tool, and the Custom Designer Layout Editor (LE) along with SmartDRD design rule-driven technology and schematic-driven Layout (SDL).