Electromagnetic Crosstalk Identification

ANSYS Pharos is an innovative electromagnetic (EM) crosstalk net/block identification software that enables IC designers to quickly and accurately uncover nets that are susceptible to EM and substrate crosstalk in their design.

Pharos combines ANSYS' unparalleled extraction engine capacity with a proprietary simulation engine to perform EM analysis and provide ranking of potential EM crosstalk aggressors per victim net. By highlighting the highest susceptible nets, designers can focus their EM analysis on the most critical nets in their design.

Why Pharos?

With Pharos you can:

  • Extract very large blocks and SoC with fast turn-around time
  • Run super-fast analysis for large-scale design blocks
  • Quickly and easily make design decisions to manage EM crosstalk
  • Experiment with various ‘what-if’ scenarios for different operating conditions

Identify Nets Susceptible to Electromagnetic and Substrate Crosstalk

Increasing design complexity along with the broad scope of magnetic field interference makes identifying all EM crosstalk susceptible victim/aggressor net pairs a very challenging, if not impossible, task. Pharos analyzes the design in terms of electromagnetic isolation between selected victim nets and all potential aggressors in the design. It returns a ranking of all potential EM crosstalk aggressor nets, from the strongest to weakest, per victim net.

Pharos enables designers to:

  • Quickly identify all potential aggressors per victim net
  • Focus on performing detailed EM analysis between critical victim/aggressor pairs
  • Perform circuit simulation at different frequency points to identify EM crosstalk risk areas
  • Issue an ECO for layout or schematics to minimize crosstalk impact based on accurate results

Block-level Analysis and SoC Signoff

Pharos can be applied both at both the block-level for analysis and the SoC-level for signoff.

At the block-level, Pharos analyzes a block or a group of blocks and reports risks associated with EM and substrate crosstalk between aggressor/victim pairs. These nets may be part of different blocks or even design hierarchy.

As a signoff tool, Pharos analyzes the entire SoC and reports the risks of EM crosstalk by aggressor nets that couple strongly with sensitive parts of the design. These nets are marked for redesign to facilitate EM-aware signoff ECO.

Multiple Reports Help De-Risk the Design Process

Pharos provides various reports including a ranked list of victim/aggressor net pairs and their potential crosstalk interference values. Text reports can be post-processed using scripts to extract more meaningful information from the analysis data.

Pharos also delivers results in a “heat map” on the layout. It shows a gradient depending on the EM crosstalk strength of each aggressor to the victim, as well as two color scale (red for high coupling, blue for low coupling) to highlight pass/fail aggressor nets.

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