OMMIC, a leading supplier of MMIC circuits and Foundry Services, has introduced a new GaN Process Design Kit (PDK) with support for ADS Electro-Thermal Simulator from Keysight Technologies. Through this capability, OMMIC offers MMIC designers accurate simulation results including the dynamic effect of temperature and temperature gradient across the die, a key factor when developing designs using a High-Power process, leading them to a successful design and a reliable product.
OMMIC’s GaN Process using High-Resistivity Silicon substrate is dedicated to microwave and millimeter wave applications, including high Power Amplifiers (PA), robust Low Noise Amplifiers (LNA) and multifunction chips required by 5G systems. The main objective of this process is to provide the same noise figure, gain and cut-off frequency as a 130 nm p-HEMT process, but with a much higher breakdown voltage, output power and LNA robustness. State of the art, a 10 W Q-band power amplifier, 1.5 dB noise figure Ka-band low noise amplifier and Q-band Transceiver/Receiver chip have already been demonstrated.
Increasing power densities require designers to pay a lot of attention to temperatures across their circuit. OMMIC’s PDK already includes self-heating models, but with this new feature, it is now possible to take into account the thermal coupling between devices without requiring any extraction of thermal parameters.
Additionally, the designer can also simulate the effect of heat transfer from the die to the package using this feature. The designer simply needs to add an ElectroThermal Simulation Controller to his existing circuit and run his simulation. Device temperatures are automatically computed and a 3D temperature profile of the die is displayed at the end of the simulation. The ElectroThermal Solver is fully integrated with the Keysight ADS environment, and there is no need to manually transfer data between different tools.
According to Julien Poulain, PDK Development and Modeling Engineer at OMMIC, the new feature has been developed in close collaboration with Keysight EEsof, and thus benefits from full compatibility with latest Keysight ADS release and has been optimized for OMMIC’s GaN technology. According to Kevin Dhawan, Foundry Program Manager at Keysight EEsof EDA, based on a full 3-D thermal solver tightly integrated with ADS circuit simulation and IC layout environment, the solution provides more accurate ‘thermally-aware’ results which include the effect of on-chip temperature rise, and thus help designers uncover potential reliability issues and failures very early in the design cycle.
