Unveiling Ansys RedHawk-SC: The Gold Standard in SoC Power Integrity and Reliability

Ansys RedHawk-SC is a preeminent software solution in the semiconductor industry, recognized as the "gold standard" for power integrity and reliability sign-off in System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. As integrated circuits (ICs) continue to shrink to advanced process nodes like 3nm and beyond, the challenges associated with power delivery, noise, and reliability become increasingly complex. RedHawk-SC addresses these critical issues by providing comprehensive multiphysics simulation capabilities, ensuring that chip designs are robust, performant, and reliable before manufacturing.

At its core, RedHawk-SC is built upon Ansys SeaScape, a custom-designed, big data architecture specifically engineered for electronic system design and simulation. This cloud-native platform provides unparalleled scalability, elastic compute capabilities, and advanced analytics, allowing engineers to handle the immense data volumes and computational demands of modern SoC designs. It facilitates rapid data mining, enabling swift identification of potential weaknesses and proactive optimization of power and performance.

Key Highlights of Ansys RedHawk-SC

Industry Gold Standard: RedHawk-SC is widely recognized and trusted by major foundries and designers for power noise and reliability sign-off across all FinFET processes, down to 3nm.
Cloud-Native Elastic Compute: Its architecture leverages cloud resources (like AWS and Azure) to offer elastic scalability, enabling full-chip analysis with remarkable speed and capacity for even the largest designs.
Comprehensive Multiphysics Analysis: The software performs detailed simulations for IR drop, electromigration (EM), and thermal reliability, with options for advanced 2.5D/3D-IC electrothermal co-simulation and hardware security analysis.

Understanding the Core Functionalities

Ansys RedHawk-SC is designed to tackle the intricate power integrity and reliability challenges inherent in modern IC designs. Its comprehensive suite of features ensures that chips can operate efficiently and dependably under various conditions.

Power Integrity and Reliability Sign-off

The primary function of RedHawk-SC is to perform power integrity and reliability sign-off. This crucial step in the semiconductor development lifecycle involves validating that a design will function as expected once manufactured. Errors at this stage can lead to costly revisions, potentially exceeding $10 million for advanced chip designs. RedHawk-SC helps mitigate these risks by providing accurate pre-silicon analysis.

IR Drop Analysis: It meticulously analyzes full-chip IR (voltage) drop, which refers to the voltage fluctuations across the power delivery network that can impact performance and functionality. RedHawk-SC provides advanced power analytics to detect and correct dynamic voltage drop, ensuring robust, low-power digital designs without performance loss.
Electromigration (EM) Analysis: Electromigration is a critical reliability concern where the sustained flow of high current densities can cause the displacement of metal atoms in interconnects, leading to opens or shorts over time. RedHawk-SC accurately simulates and identifies areas susceptible to EM, preventing long-term reliability issues.
Thermal Reliability: Integrated thermal analysis capabilities allow designers to assess the thermal performance of their chips. Excessive heat can degrade performance and accelerate aging. RedHawk-SC helps in understanding and mitigating thermal hotspots.

The software offers comprehensive dynamic analysis coverage, supporting various simulation modes, including RTL and gate vectors, smart vectorless analysis, mix-mode simulation, and frequency-aware vectorless analysis to stress system-level power delivery networks (PDNs), power-transients, and power-up sequences.

Advanced Multiphysics Capabilities

Beyond core power integrity, RedHawk-SC extends its capabilities to address complex multiphysics interactions essential for advanced packaging and security.

Electrothermal Co-simulation (RedHawk-SC Electrothermal)

For complex 2.5D/3D IC systems, Ansys RedHawk-SC Electrothermal offers an advanced option that concurrently solves electrical, thermal, and mechanical coupling interactions. This is crucial for multi-die packages where the interplay between electrical power delivery, heat dissipation, and mechanical stress significantly impacts overall system performance and reliability. It can analyze up to a billion instances, providing detailed insights into signal integrity (SI) effects within the package interconnects by extracting RC parasitics across the entire 3D stack.

Ansys RedHawk-SC Interface showing analysis results for power integrity.

An illustrative view of the Ansys RedHawk-SC analysis interface, demonstrating power integrity simulations for complex chip designs.

Hardware Security Analysis (RedHawk-SC Security)

In an increasingly security-conscious world, RedHawk-SC Security stands as the EDA industry's first pre-silicon hardware security solution. It identifies side-channel leakage vulnerabilities, which can be exploited to extract sensitive data like cryptographic keys. By performing multiphysics simulations of power consumption, power noise, and electromagnetic emissions from the layout's RTL, it predicts potential leakage before manufacturing, allowing designers to implement countermeasures and enhance hardware security.

Cloud-Native and Big Data Architecture: Ansys SeaScape

A defining feature of RedHawk-SC is its foundation on Ansys SeaScape, a purpose-built big data architecture. This architecture enables:

Elastic Compute: RedHawk-SC distributes computational workloads across numerous CPU cores with low memory requirements (less than 32GB per worker), making it highly suitable for cloud environments like AWS and Azure. This elastic scalability allows it to solve the largest chips within hours.
Per-Core Scalability: SeaScape provides per-core scalability, flexible design data access, and instantaneous design bring-up.
Big Data Analytics: It integrates MapReduce-enabled analytics, facilitating rapid data mining and the exploration of thousands of switching scenarios. This capability helps prioritize vector sets by analyzing multiple parameters, enabling faster identification of design weaknesses and optimization opportunities.
Multi-site Collaboration: RedHawk-SC supports multi-site collaboration, allowing teams to simultaneously view, debug, and explore design and simulation data.

Integration with EDA Flows and Machine Learning

RedHawk-SC seamlessly integrates with all major Electronic Design Automation (EDA) implementation flows and other Ansys tools, such as Ansys Path FX (for variability-aware timing analysis) and Ansys PathFinder (for electrostatic discharge analysis). Furthermore, it leverages machine learning capabilities to automate time-consuming manual procedures and identify systematic design weaknesses by aggregating insights from continuous and prior simulation data.

The Power of Ansys RedHawk-SC: A Performance Overview

To better understand the multifaceted strengths of Ansys RedHawk-SC, let's consider a comparative analysis across several key performance and feature dimensions. The radar chart below visually represents its capabilities in areas vital for modern SoC design and verification.

This radar chart illustrates the superior capabilities of Ansys RedHawk-SC compared to a typical legacy power integrity tool. RedHawk-SC excels in areas such as Power Integrity Accuracy, Electromigration Reliability, and Scalability due to its cloud-native architecture. While legacy tools might offer basic functionalities, they often fall short in advanced areas like Security Analysis, comprehensive Big Data Analytics, and seamless integration with modern EDA flows. RedHawk-SC's strength lies in its holistic approach, covering a broader spectrum of critical design and verification needs with higher precision and efficiency.

Applications Across Industries

Ansys RedHawk-SC is indispensable for companies designing complex SoCs for various markets, including mobile, communications, high-performance computing (HPC), and automotive. Its robust analysis capabilities ensure that these critical components are power-efficient and reliable, mitigating risks related to thermal, electromigration, and electrostatic discharge (ESD) issues.

The software’s ability to conduct full-chip analysis with high speed and capacity makes it particularly valuable for advanced process nodes (down to 3nm), where design complexities are immense and validation is paramount for first-time silicon success.

Key Features and Benefits at a Glance

The table below summarizes the key features of Ansys RedHawk-SC and the benefits they provide to IC designers and verification engineers.

Feature Category	Specific Feature	Benefit to Users
Power Integrity Analysis	Full-chip IR Drop Analysis (Static & Dynamic)	Identifies voltage fluctuations across power delivery networks, preventing performance degradation and functional failures.
	Electromigration (EM) Analysis	Predicts and mitigates long-term reliability issues due to current-induced material degradation in interconnects.
	Timing Impact of IR-Drop	Assesses how voltage drops affect timing, ensuring designs meet performance specifications.
Reliability Analysis	Thermal Reliability Analysis	Identifies and manages thermal hotspots, crucial for maintaining chip performance and longevity.
	Electrothermal Co-simulation (2.5D/3D ICs)	Analyzes coupled electrical, thermal, and mechanical interactions in complex multi-die systems.
Cloud & Scalability	Cloud-Native Elastic Compute (Ansys SeaScape)	Enables rapid, scalable analysis of massive chip designs by distributing workloads across many CPU cores.
	Low Memory Footprint per Worker	Optimized for cloud deployment, requiring less than 32GB per worker CPU, reducing infrastructure costs.
Advanced Analytics	Big Data Analytics & Machine Learning Support	Facilitates rapid data mining, identifies design weaknesses, and automates optimization processes.
	Vectored and Vectorless Activity Analysis	Provides comprehensive coverage for dynamic power supply noise identification by exploring various switching scenarios.
Hardware Security	Side-Channel Leakage Analysis (RedHawk-SC Security)	Predicts and quantifies hardware vulnerabilities to side-channel attacks pre-silicon, enhancing chip security.
Integration & Collaboration	Integration with Major EDA Flows	Seamlessly fits into existing design environments, working with other Ansys tools and third-party solutions.
	Multi-site Collaboration Support	Enables distributed teams to view, debug, and explore design and simulation data concurrently.

Understanding RedHawk-SC in Action

To further contextualize Ansys RedHawk-SC's role and capabilities, consider the "Introducing ANSYS RedHawk-SC" video. This video provides an excellent overview of the software's architecture and its benefits for achieving design success in advanced SoC power noise sign-off.

"Introducing ANSYS RedHawk-SC" provides an in-depth look at how the software addresses the challenges of advanced SoC designs, particularly concerning power noise and reliability at sub-16nm nodes. It highlights the integration with the SeaScape platform and its implications for elastic compute and big data analytics, reinforcing RedHawk-SC's position as a critical tool for achieving silicon success.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is the primary purpose of Ansys RedHawk-SC?

Ansys RedHawk-SC is primarily used for power integrity and reliability sign-off in System-on-Chip (SoC) designs, ensuring chips operate reliably and efficiently before manufacturing by analyzing issues like IR drop, electromigration, and thermal effects.

How does Ansys RedHawk-SC handle large and complex designs?

RedHawk-SC is built on the Ansys SeaScape big data architecture, which features a cloud-native elastic compute engine. This allows it to distribute computational workloads across numerous CPU cores, providing the speed and capacity to analyze even the largest full-chip designs within hours.

Can RedHawk-SC analyze security vulnerabilities?

Yes, Ansys RedHawk-SC Security is a specialized solution that performs multiphysics simulations to identify hardware side-channel leakage vulnerabilities in pre-silicon IC designs, helping prevent security breaches.

What is RedHawk-SC Electrothermal?

RedHawk-SC Electrothermal is an advanced option of Ansys RedHawk-SC that focuses on analyzing the electrical, thermal, and mechanical coupling interactions in complex 2.5D/3D IC structures. It's crucial for understanding multiphysics effects in multi-die packages.

Is Ansys RedHawk-SC compatible with other EDA tools?

Yes, RedHawk-SC is designed for seamless integration with all major EDA implementation flows, as well as other Ansys tools such as Ansys Path FX and Ansys PathFinder, ensuring a cohesive design and verification environment.

Conclusion

Ansys RedHawk-SC stands as a cornerstone in the semiconductor industry for ensuring the power integrity and reliability of modern System-on-Chip designs. Its cloud-native, big data architecture, powered by Ansys SeaScape, enables unparalleled scalability and efficiency, addressing the complex challenges of advanced process nodes. From comprehensive IR drop and electromigration analysis to sophisticated electrothermal co-simulation for 2.5D/3D ICs and pioneering hardware security verification, RedHawk-SC provides designers with the trusted tools necessary for first-time silicon success and robust product performance in an increasingly demanding technological landscape. Its ability to combine accuracy with high capacity and rapid analysis positions it as an indispensable solution for navigating the complexities of next-generation chip development.