Two years ago, I updated everyone on the Liberty standard which was the first open source standard in the electronic design automation industry. Synopsys made our .lib format (which evolved into Liberty) an open source standard in 1999, opening a new page in the standards game. Today, I’d like to talk briefly about the newest open source standard for EDA, the Interconnect Technology Format (ITF).

ITF is a very well established, mature format, and technology files written in this format exist for a large number of process nodes that designers are using today. It is the underlying format used by Synopsys’ interconnect parasitic extraction tools such as StarRC™. As an open source standard, ITF will enable all designers and foundries to support and qualify extraction technology files based on same format. Further, all EDA vendors’ tools will be able to support the format, providing increased efficiency and improved interoperability.

It is one thing to open up this format; yet it is quite another to enhance it in an open forum. A new technical committee under IEEE-ISTO called the Interconnect Modeling Technical Advisory Board (IMTAB) will provide exactly that. Eleven industry leaders make up the initial IMTAB. EDA companies (Apache, Magma, Mentor and Synopsys), foundries and IDMs (GLOBALFOUNDRIES, ST), and representatives from the user community (AMD, Altera, LSI, Nvidia, and Qualcomm) are the initial members for the IMTAB. The group is expected to meet at least twice a year to consider the enhancement proposals, debate the pros and cons, and vote on proposals to extend the format  appropriately. Future needs for the ITF standard, such as modeling of Through-Silicon Vias (TSV) for 3-D interconnect parasitics, will be addressed by the IMTAB.

As technology keeps advancing, new opportunities for standardization continue to arise.