Circuit Migration: Software or Service?

Moving IP to a new foundry or process node is a complicated business.  IN2FAB's migration tools and services take the guesswork out of transferring silicon to a new home.

Rapid semiconductor IP migration has long been recognized as one of the most challenging problems in semiconductor design.  While digital circuits can be regenerated with a high degree of automation, analog IP is often redesigned from scratch, leading to long lead times and missed opportunities.  


Specialized design tools, such as IN2FAB’s OSIRIS software, can give companies a major advantage when moving schematic and layout data to new technology nodes, but even that may not be enough when engineering resources are tight.  


Another option is to use a design service to move IP from one node to another and this can be very attractive when resources are scarce and schedules are tight.  An experienced and dedicated group of IP migration engineers can take existing analog and mixed signal IP and return it in the process of a customer’s choice.  

Migration Project Manager, Sarah Grant, highlights the importance of having a dedicated design flow for these projects. “The key to migration is the initial feasibility study that examines the data and acts as a baseline for the migration work. This study identifies the relationships between the original and new manufacturing process as well as the contents of the circuit; drawing out information that allows us to build a schedule and highlight important technical information.”

Another advantage of structuring the work in this way is that it allows design engineers to pick out the most critical parts of a circuit and move them to the top of the queue.  Migrated schematics of the critical elements are soon followed by layout in the new process, enabling a full simulation in the target process, complete with extracted parasitic data.  Simply simulating a schematic and adjusting component sizes offers little advantage when it comes to migration as it relies on a complete re-layout which is usually the bottleneck when delivering analog IP.


Schematic and layout migration services are an extremely efficient way to move IP from one process to another, but engineers and managers are sometimes reluctant to explore its potential.  “Analog engineers often want to craft every transistor to the finest degree but there’s not always time for that”, says Grant.  “Market windows can be very small so a migrated circuit that’s a few points from absolute peak performance can make the difference between a lucrative product and a missed opportunity.  Migration services deliver silicon in a fraction of the time for a redesign while leaving a company’s engineers to focus on designing the next generation of products.”

“Our IP migration group has transferred everything from small IP analog IP blocks to entire IP platforms between foundries and process nodes. Sometimes it’s exactly what’s needed to fit our customers’ business needs.”