Nikkei Electronics Asia -- June 2007
Design View from Japan
EDA Tool Developed for SiP Feasibility Studies

The Japanese EDA tool, GemPackage, was created through a collaborative project between industry and academia. It comes with a user interface fully as good as other commercial EDA tools. It also offers interfaces with other software used in design. These unusual characteristics are no doubt due to the fact that the project was handled differently from other EDA tools developed as joint industry-academia projects. 

The EDA tool was developed by MURATA Hiroshi Design Technology of Japan, which is essentially Hiroshi Murata himself. The original idea of developing the tool began when he worked at Murata Manufacturing Co Ltd of Japan, a major electronic components manufacturer. (Hiroshi Murata is no relation to the Murata who founded the components manufacturing firm.) 

While at Murata Manufacturing Hiroshi Murata was involved with EDA systems for hybrid integrated circuits (IC), and after he left the company he developed this new EDA tool. When Prof Hiroshi Kajitani of the University of Kitakyushu of Japan saw the tool, he invited Murata to the university as a commissioned professor. At the university, work on the tool continued, with assistance from and improvements made by a number of corporations. Companies like Toshiba LSI Package Solutions Corp and Daisho Denshi Co Ltd, both of Japan, provided information such as their design rules and expertise. Several firms installed the new tool in 2005, and in the second half of 2006 agent CADPRODUCTS Inc of Japan began widespread marketing.

GUI Innovations
The GemPackage EDA tool is used for feasibility studies for IC packages, system-in-packages (SiP) and similar designs, especially to see if the proposed IC will actually fit in the package, and within budget. For example, it helps in evaluations of whether wire bonding can be performed with sufficient reliability, whether wiring is likely to be free of shorts, and whether multiple wiring layers can be formed without exceeding cost ceilings. 

There have been EDA tools available for some time for detailed package design, but they require very detailed set-up once all the data is ready, and simply aren't practical for this type of feasibility study unless used by engineers with expertise in package substrate detail design. GemPackage, on the other hand, was developed specifically for feasibility studies, intended for use by people not intimately familiar with packages, such as chip designers. 

Even though it can be used by operators without specialized package knowledge, GemPackage offers two functions not found in many competing products. The first is a design function to roughly route the wiring on the package substrate. All the operator has to do is make some general suggestions about routes via the graphical user interface (GUI), and the tool automatically sketches out routes in accordance with design rules. The second function is a sophisticated check function for bonding wires. For example, it can check risk hedging in manufacturing in the following situation.

Wires flex during bonding, and if a wire happens to come into contact with a non-insulated part of the pattern as a result, it forms a short. GemPackage checks to see if bonding wires pass over non-insulated pattern areas, helping prevent problems in manufacturing. 

The tool accepts netlists and outputs design result reports in Excel format, which is familiar to designers. While it has only been on the market for a short time, many firms appear to be very interested in GemPackage, and a number of companies which didn't snap it up in 2005 are evaluating it now. Murata is determined to keep pushing the product, including functional enhancements, and is moving into Asian markets outside Japan.

by Ikutaro Kojima

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