Agilent Technologies Inc. announced plans to expand the company's investment in its Integrated Circuit Characterization and Analysis Program (IC-CAP) device modeling software.


The company will establish a new research and development modeling center in Beijing, China, to better serve the industry's leading semiconductor foundries and to respond to advancements in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) modeling in particular.

"The recent decline in viable solutions has allowed Agilent to gain marketplace prominence as the only Fortune 500 company providing CMOS modeling solutions," said Jim McGillivary, general manager with Agilent's EEsof EDA division.

"We've seen several leading semiconductor foundries choose IC-CAP because they want a device-modeling platform that keeps pace with CMOS technology advances. We're increasing our investment in this important area by adding key engineering talent in Asia, where we can work closely with these foundries."

IC-CAP provides powerful and efficient characterization and analysis capabilities for today's semiconductor modeling processes, including instrument control, data acquisition, graphical analysis, simulation, optimization and statistical analysis.

IC-CAP is the first device-modeling software platform to include a comprehensive extraction methodology for all three of the standard CMOS device models (BSIM3, BSIM4 and PSP), giving designers the ability to use current extraction processes and move to the next-generation model within a single software environment.

Recent advances in IC-CAP have led to great improvements in device modeling productivity. IC-CAP's intelligent direct extraction methodology, compared with the more time-consuming optimization approach, has allowed modelers to reduce core tasks from 14 to two days when using IC-CAP and the BSIM4 modeling package.