1

---

Introduction to Legato™ Reliability Solution

---

Reliability throughout the product’s life cycle is the top-most challenge faced by the analog designers involved in designing the advanced and complex devices used in mission-critical systems for aerospace, automative and medical equipments. Not only it is important to produce reliable devices by eliminating all possible manufacturing defects, but it is also essential to ensure high performance in extreme operating conditions throughout their useful life. This requires a deep analysis of the effects of high temperature and other stress conditions that can lead to an early end of life.

The Legato™ Reliability Solution is the industry’s first complete analog IC design-for-reliability solution that empowers the analog designers with a set of three new analyses that they can include in design simulations to address these challenges.

The three analyses in this solution are based on the Virtuoso® IC custom design platform and Spectre® Accelerated Parallel Simulator.

The following sections explain how to use these analyses to improve the reliability of your analog designs:

• Analog Defect Simulation
• Electrothermal Analysis
• Advanced Aging Analysis

Related Learning Resources

• Legato Reliability Solution product page

Licensing Requirements

The Legato Reliability Solution is available in IC6.1.8, ICADVM18.1, and SPECTRE 18.1 releases. In Spectre 18.1, this solution is available only with Spectre® Accelerated Parallel Simulator (Spectre APS) high performance multi-core SPICE engine.

The licenses required for the Legato Reliability Solution are listed below.

• 95260, Virtuoso ADE Assembler license
• A new Legato reliability solution license, which is a pack of 6 tokens, is required to run the following reliability features:
  

  Features	No of tokens	Functionality
  Analog Fault Simulation	3	Spectre transient fault analysis and Spectre direct fault analysis
  Fault Generation	0	info what=bridges|opens Does not check out the license; however, checks for the availability of the license.
  spectre_ddmrpt	0	spectre_ddmrpt Does not check out the license; however, checks for the availability of the license.
  spectre_fsrpt	0	Does not check out the license; however, checks for the availability of the license.
  Electrothermal Simulation	2	Spectre electrothermal simulation Electrothermal simulation requires a Sigtherm_Signoff license during Spectre thermal extraction, and 2 Legato tokens during the remaining electrothermal simulation. The Sigtherm_Signoff license is released after thermal extraction is completed, and then the 2 legato tokens are checked out.
  RelXpert	4	RelXpert simulation
  Spectre self-heating	1	Spectre self-heating analysis
  Spectre self-heating + aging analysis	1	Spectre self-heating and aging analysis
  Aging analysis + Monte Carlo	1	Aging Monte Carlo analysis
  RF reliability analysis	1	Spectre RF reliability analysis
  Spectre reliability with XPS S mode	1	Spectre reliability analysis with XPS SPICE mode

For information on licensing for Virtuoso products, see Virtuoso Software Licensing and Configuration Guide.