Raphael is a two-dimensional and three-dimensional field solvers collection for interconnect design and analysis. It calculates the electrical and thermal phenomena in complex on-chip interconnect structures. The graphical user interface allows process data to be easily incorporated and the critical interconnect geometries to be automatically generated. Raphael extracts capacitance, resistance, and inductance for optimizing multi-level interconnects and on-chip parasitics using its industry-standard field solvers and interfaces. It considers the effect of process variation by investigation of complex interconnect geometries and administrates a database to investigate the effect of design-rule changes. Its features include two- and three-dimensional capacitance and resistance extraction of interconnect structures by the finite difference method, two- and three-dimensional interconnect capacitance computation by the boundary element method, three-dimensional inductance and resistance calculation under consideration of skin effect, electric field and potential calculation, temperature and current density distribution simulation considering floating conductors and conformal dielectric layers with anisotropic permittivity.
Star-RCXT is accurate parasitic extraction tool, providing solution for ASIC, on-chip systems, digital and analog designs. Some of its features include three-dimensional parasitic computation with accurate process variation modeling, substrate extraction, automatic field solver flow, chemical-mechanical polishing simulation and litho-aware extraction.
Raphael NXT complements Star-RCXT by three-dimensional capacitance extraction of critical nets, cells, or blocks on the full-chip level. It considers conformal dielectrics, trapezoidal conductor cross sections, metal fill, and lithography effects to model accurately the complex interconnect geometries. Raphael NXT makes use of the floating random-walk method [7,8], which allows parameter extraction in domains with a size well beyond the reach of mesh-based simulators. Usually Raphael NXT applies a 0 V Dirichlet boundary condition at the outer bounds of the simulation domain. However, reflecting Neumann boundary conditions and periodic boundary conditions for structures with repeated cells can be also specified explicitly. Due to the floating random-walk method Raphael NXT provides distributed computation even with different loads on different processors.