WIN Semiconductors, the world’s largest pure-play GaAs wafer foundry providing low-cost manufacturing of high speed and high quality GaAs MMICs (monolithic microwave integrated circuits) and RFIC's (radio frequency ICs), today announced its adoption and support of the Electro-Thermal analysis capability in Agilent Technologies’ Advanced Design System (ADS) electronic design automation software.

As higher power devices are integrated into smaller packages, thermal issues cause performance degradation, reliability problems and even failures. Modeling thermal effects can be challenging for IC designers. Existing thermal solvers are not well integrated into IC design tools, requiring manual and error-prone data transfer between the layout environment, thermal solver and circuit simulators.

The ADS Electro-Thermal Simulator provides a full 3D thermal solver that is tightly integrated with the ADS layout environment and circuit simulators. Designers simply add the Electro-Thermal controller to the ADS schematic, start a circuit simulation and the integrated thermal solver runs in the background. No more manual export of IC layouts to stand-alone thermal solvers or manual import of temperature data into the circuit simulators is required.

"We see a strong demand from our customers to predict electro-thermal behavior in their high-power RF and microwave designs,” said Brian Lee, Vice President of Sales & Marketing center at WIN Semiconductors. "Since ADS is used by a significant number of our customers, we have been collaborating with Agilent to upgrade several of our PDKs to support the new Electro-Thermal Simulator in ADS."

“We are very pleased with this next milestone in our collaboration with WIN Semiconductors,” said Juergen Hartung, foundry program manager with Agilent EEsof EDA. “Based on a full 3-D thermal solver tightly integrated with ADS circuit simulation and IC layout environment, this solution provides accurate, thermally-aware simulation results, including steady-state, transient and envelope analyses, that account for thermal coupling between devices, as well as heat transfer through the die and packaging.”

The WIN PDKs support a complete ADS front-to-backend MMIC design flow with scalable devices, integrated 3-D electromagnetic engines, native design rule checker and the latest layout capabilities in ADS.

A preview of the Electro-Thermal Simulator support for the WIN PH50-0X PDK is available at the EUROPEAN MICROWAVE WEEK 2013, in Nuremberg, Germany, Oct. 8 – 10. For more details please visit us at booth 163.

About WIN Semiconductors

WIN Semiconductors Corporation is the leading global provider of pure-play GaAs wafer foundry services for the wireless, infrastructure and networking markets. WIN provides its foundry partners with a diverse portfolio of Hetero-junction Bipolar Transistor (HBT) and Pseudomorphic High Electron Mobility Transistor (pHEMT) and BiHEMT process platforms that support leading edge products for applications from 50 MHz to 100 GHz. Custom products built by WIN Semiconductors Corporation are found in a vast array of markets, including smartphone, mobile infrastructure, optical communications, CATV and automotive applications.

For more than 13 years, WIN has provided foundry services from its state of the art, ISO9001/14001 certified 150mm GaAs facility headquartered in Tao Yuan county, Taiwan. This multi-site manufacturing facility has more than 1400 employees and provides WIN customers with a diverse array of device technology platforms and value added services, including DC/RF product testing, Cu wafer bumping and turn-key packaging solutions for accelerated product development.