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.
