Easy-To-Use Tools Help Meet Hard Deadlines

 

Founded in 2001 by a team of leading researchers in power electronics design at Bell Labs, Enpirion is already a leader in point-of-load and dynamic power management applications for computers, communications, and consumer electronics.

“We use advanced process technology, but most of our competition is still at older design rules,” says Dr. Jian Tan, technology director. “And we have developed our own proprietary process that we can deploy at mainstream CMOS foundries to improve performance.”

The company’s 10W DC/DC converter-on-a-chip combines analog and digital control circuits, an integrated power transistor, and a built-in inductor fabricated in the metal layers using micro-electromechanical machining (MEMS) techniques.

Board Space Critical in Today’s Power Management Products

According to Tan, power-management devices consume as much as 70 percent of board space in electronics design. The company’s mission is to replace space- and power-hungry switch regulators with its single-chip solutions.

To obtain their market-leading size and performance, Enpirion’s products require careful, handcrafted mixed-signal circuit design. “With a hand-drawn circuit, we can achieve the smallest die size possible,” says Tan.

With more than 3,000 transistors on the die, the usability of the design team’s chosen design tool was critical to meeting the company’s tight deadlines. Once the company received its Series A funding, the race was on to produce the first integrated circuit (IC) design in less than six months.

Tan initially selected Tanner EDA’s L-Edit as Enpirion’s layout software because it offered the capabilities needed at a price that a startup can afford. He said competing solutions from larger EDA suppliers such as Cadence Design Systems would have cost at least 10 times more.

Designers Up and Running in Days

Some of the designers, including Tan, had used L-Edit before and knew the capabilities of the Tanner software. One designer had only used the Cadence tool Virtuoso® before, but he was up and running on L-Edit in less than a week.

“According to him, the L-Edit interface is easier to use,” says Tan. “In fact, after a week of using the Tanner tool, he said he loved it and that it’s a much better tool.”

A further benefit for the company is that L-Edit runs on a PC, a factor that helped greatly when trying to beat the clock on the first design. “Engineers don’t have to be tied to working in the office,” says Tan. “They can do layout in the evening or on weekends on a notebook PC. That really helped accelerate the design and get it ready for tape-out.”

Layout Checks Used Foundry Rules

As well as L-Edit, Enpirion used the design-rules checking (DRC) and layout-versus-schematic (LVS) options of Tanner’s HiPer solution to verify the layout. The company recently upgraded to the HiPer Verify, which can natively run rule decks in Mentor Graphics’ Calibre® format.

“HiPer’s DRC capabilities are much more affordable than competing tools and gave Enpirion the ability to work with standard rule decks provided by the company’s foundry,” says Tan. “It works very well and completes DRC and LVS in a couple of hours,” Tan said.

Having taped out several products, the company is working on variants that will increase Enpirion’s market penetration. The company recently raised $17 million in Series B funding that will help it market its products more widely and develop new ones. “The main thing is to broaden our product portfolio based on our existing process technology,” concludes Tan. “We will develop more circuits, not just for the current process, but for a more advanced technology. We aim to produce even finer technology.”

For product, pricing and licensing information please contact a Tanner representative via email at salesnw@tanner.com or +1-626-471-9701.