One of the newest members to the ESD Alliance and SEMI community is D2S, a supplier of GPU-accelerated solutions for semiconductor manufacturing. I’m particularly pleased to welcome D2S since the ESD Alliance’s goal this year is to better connect design and manufacturing, something D2S can help us accomplish.

Aki Fujimura is a founder and CEO of D2S and a well-known and long-time member of the electronic design automation industry going all the way back to Tangent Systems in 1984. Tangent was acquired by Cadence Design Systems in 1989 and that’s where Aki and I start our conversation.

Bob: It’s been 31 years since Cadence acquired Tangent, a company you were a co-founder of along with Steve Teig, Terry Smith, Mark Flomenhoft, and Randy Smith, who died unexpectedly earlier this year. What impact did Tangent have on the industry and on you personally?

Aki: Yeah, I miss Randy. Steve Teig and I got to work with a team of talented and dedicated engineers at Tangent to bring to market the first commercial place and route (P&R) software using “over the cell” routing designed to handle multi-layered process technology for ASICs and SOCs.

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It`s hard not to be enthusiastic about CEMWorks (pronounced C-E-M Works) of Winnipeg, Canada, one of the ESD Alliance’s new member companies. I recently spoke with Jonaton (Jon) Aronsson, its founder and CEO, and Cielo Gerrie, vice president of business development, who offer a great vision of how advanced electromagnetic simulation will play an important role in the not-too-distant future. As we talk, it’s obvious it is needed now as well to support EDA and complex system design challenges.

Jon Aronsson, CEMWorks Founder and CEO

First, a look at CEMWorks. The nine-year-old company develops and supplies innovative electromagnetic simulation tools. Its fast, accurate and customizable electromagnetic simulation solutions are required to deliver more compact, robust, efficient and cost-effective products and applications. Sure, our industry supports and understands microwave and millimeter wave technologies. As we move into Smart Cities, ADAs (advanced driver assistance systems), 5G and other high-frequency, highly connected applications including wireless communications subsystems, the need for a new generation of electromagnetic simulation tools is acute.

Cielo Gerrie, CEMWorks Vice President of Business Development

Back to my talk with Jon and Cielo. In their view, EDA solutions need to face the future as well. Our community of chip designers is moving rapidly from being chip centric to system centric. Yes, chips are being designed as components in a sub-system that may include leading-edge packaging, interconnects and often antennas. CEMWorks intends to provide tools for accurately modeling and predicting the performance of these complex subsystems to ensure they can be manufactured. This is further evidence of the perspective held by the ESD Alliance and SEMI as we work to bring design and manufacturing closer together.

According to Jon, accurate modeling is much more than just design rules, a standard product from the EDA playbook, with more algorithms based on physics and a huge scientific project, he admits. That’s why, after 10 years, CEMWorks still considers itself to be a startup. Yes, it can take 10 years to fully develop the technology and CEMWorks now is seeing interesting results to problems other companies can’t solve.

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