Extending an FET layout verification system to bipolar technology

Rink, an automatic layout verification system intended for FET technologies, has been enhanced to handle bipolar designs. A straightforward procedure that uses Rink's parasitic capacitance extractor to solve the bipolar device identification problem is described. The bipolar enhancements to Rink have been used successfully on a set of seven high-speed bipolar chips designed for lightwave communication. These chips ranged in complexity from 23 to 67 devices. Full-custom, nonmanhattan layouts for these chips were created on polygon-pusher style layout editors. For each chip, Rink executed an automatic comparison of the netlist extracted from the layout against a SPICE reference netlist. The latter has been coded for SPICE design simulations. Several fatal connectivity errors were uncovered as were a few significant disparities in resistor values and transistor sizes.<<ETX>>