Advanced Quality Assurance Platform for Robust Process Design Kits

Process design kits (PDKs) and their robustness verification are pivotal to a semiconductor foundry’s growth and customer retention. This paper presents an extended version of our automated PDK quality assurance (QA) platform, initially introduced to maintain production-quality PDKs deployable at any time. The platform utilizes continuous integration and continuous delivery tools to detect and resolve problems early, significantly reducing the time required for pre-release PDK verification. We have embedded this QA platform into the PDK verification flow for 0.13 \(\upmu \) m and 0.25 \(\upmu \) m SiGe BiCMOS technologies, ensuring reliable on-demand PDK releases. Additionally, we extend our discussion to include the results viewer application that enhances identification and organization of the issues across various PDKs, further improving verification efficiency. This paper also introduces a new analysis of the trend in PDK issues reported by customers, illustrating the platform’s effectiveness in quality assurance and optimization of the PDK development process for semiconductor technologies. The enhanced features and insights detailed in this paper reinforce our approach and highlight significant improvements in interoperable PDK verification, utilizing previously released PDKs as benchmarks.