Automotive Excellence – From Design to Volume Production

Engineers developing IC solutions for the exciting automotive market are no strangers to making constant trade-offs between ever increasing performance levels and one of the strictest reliability and quality requirements. Tower’s industry leading analog technologies, with its best-in-class design enablement capabilities, are already popular with the designers in RF, high-performance analog, power management and sensor applications. Tower’s automotive foundry program complements this rich suite of technologies by providing a full-circle framework and methodology to deliver the highest quality and reliability requirements for this rapidly evolving automotive market.
In the first part of this webinar, we will demonstrate how industry specifications for automotive mass production from the foundry perspective translate into Tower’s world-class quality system and methodologies implemented on the production floor. We will articulate guidelines for physical and environmental mission-profile reliability qualification success criteria that are distinct from non-automotive products. Through several examples / case studies we will present our Automotive Quality Policy and in-field implementation including, for example, the zero-defect mentality methodology, Maverick Alert System, and other capabilities.
In the second part, we will show case the design enablement capabilities that allows designing robust products before they hit the production floor. As the number of electronic components in automobiles increases exponentially, it becomes necessary to introduce robustness and manufacturability criteria in the design itself. Therefore, the PDKs must be augmented to include delicate, analog/automotive layout checks for symmetry, matching, and alignment, and ensure that layout follows design constrains as defined in schematics. Tower provides its customers an automated way of checking those constrains using an enhanced PDK and by running Calibre PERC. Using Band gap reference design with several hierarchy levels, we demonstrate a complete flow starting with defining constraints either on the schematic or layout, running the Calibre PERC and then verifying the results in the layout.