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Keysight Technologies, Inc. has introduced Chiplet PHY Designer, the latest member in its family of high-speed digital design and simulation tools that provides die-to-die (D2D) interconnect simulation, which is a key step in verifying performance for heterogeneous and 3D integrated circuit (IC) designs commonly referred to as chiplets. The new electronic design automation (EDA) tool is the industry’s first to provide in-depth modeling and simulation capabilities that enable chiplet designers to rapidly and accurately verify that their designs meet specifications of the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express™ (UCIe™) standard.

UCIe is emerging as the leading chiplet interconnect specification in the semiconductor industry. It is an open standard that defines the interconnect between chiplets within an advanced 2.5D or 3D package. UCIe is in process of being supported or adopted by many of the top semiconductor equipment and EDA tool vendors as well as foundries and chiplet designers. Designers who use the interconnect standard and ensure their chiplets perform to its specifications are helping establish a broad ecosystem for chiplet interoperability and commerce.

Keysight EDA’s research and development team has been working on modelling and simulating high-speed digital interfaces aligned with industry specifications for decades. For example, ADS Memory Designer offers comprehensive memory interface coverage such as GDDR7, DDR5, LPDDR5, and HBM3 with its IBIS-AMI modeler. Its rigorous and genuine JEDEC compliance test solution handles over 100 test IDs with the same test algorithm found in the Keysight Infinium oscilloscope family.

Features of the Chiplet

Key features of the Chiplet PHY Designer physical-layer simulator include:

• Supports UCIe physical layer standard – automated parsing of signals following the standard naming conventions, automated connections between multiple dies through package interconnects, standard driven simulation setup such as speed grade, and intuitive measurement setup through specialized probe component.
• Measurement of voltage transfer function (VTF) – precisely computes a VTF to ensure UCIe specification compliance and analyzes system bit error rate (BER) down to 1e-27 or 1e-32 levels. Measures eye diagram height, eye width, skew, mask margin, and BER contour.
• Analysis of forwarded clocking to accurately capture the asynchronous clocking behavior.

Adrien Auge, Senior Staff Applications Engineer at Alphawave Semi, said: “The ability to validate Alphawave Semi’s chiplet solutions is crucial for enabling a future of heterogenous chip design, as it ensures seamless operation and interoperability for 2.5D/3D solutions available to our customers. Chiplet PHY Designer simplifies the electrical simulation process for large die-die electrical connectivity, such as UCIe. It provides engineers and designers a quick and easy path to extract electrical compliance of their solutions against the latest revision of the specification. Furthermore, by complying with the latest IBIS modeling specification for electrical I/O, physical integrators can delve deeper into the chiplet electrical validation process, leveraging our detailed models to obtain pre-silicon performance predictions.”

Niels Faché, Vice President and General Manager, Keysight EDA, said: “Our high-speed digital simulation team capitalized on its understanding of the shift left challenges presented by SerDes PHYS. They have applied these learnings to the chiplet domain to extend success of our standards-based simulation strategy to UCIe. Interconnect modeling is critical to system design and performance. Chiplet PHY Designer accelerates validation of chiplet subsystems, from one D2D PHY through interconnect channels to another D2D PHY, much earlier in the design cycle. It enables 3D IC designers to solve critical interconnect performance problems improving predictive virtual prototyping to speed time-to-market.”

See Chiplet PHY Designer at DesignCon

Keysight will be demonstrating Chiplet PHY Designer in its DesignCon booth #1039 at the Santa Clara Convention Center from January 31 to February 1, 2024.

For more information, visit: Chiplet PHY Designer.

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