ESDi Release Notes

ESDi release 7.4-RC12
October 2017

List of features/enhancements

  • Improved speed of
    • HBM testing phase
    • Fieldview: Precalculated fields are sliced per layer. Switching field views between layers, or turning on/off layers in multi-layer views is much faster. Maximum amount of memory spent for caching is settable in preferences.
    • Show pads/terminals in fieldview.
    • Opening ESDSummary view.
  • New behavior when clicking on EM violations in ESDSummary view.
    • ESD summary view columns order/hiding is configurable by the user and persistent. You can drag columns and right click to hide them.
    • Select violated test from EM violations by (right)clicking only. Add an arrow to show the location of an emviolation. Pushing the escape key removes the arrow.
    • The EM violation does enable the metal layers by default. It also puts the view in the Z access whereas XY would be much more meaningful. You can toggle this new functionality on/off in the preferences.
  • Show graph of test of the full graph with full resolution. The graphs format has been changed from png to svg. They are vector based, smaller, faster and scalable. They also start by showing the full graph.
  • Improved GUI features
    • Reworked move polygons to avoid unintential moves
    • Adding Device tab in layerview for quicker navigation
    • Keyboard panning in layerview and fieldview by the arrow keys
    • Test dropbox in fieldview is searchable
    • Pads/devices in layerview are searchable
    • Added a button to remove metal slots (“Fill metal slots”) for faster simulation
    • Switch consistently between layer-view and fieldview: opening a layer-view when we have a fieldview zoomed to a specific place, also opens the layer-view using the same place/zoom and vice versa.
    • Field view now shows pads/terminals of the current ESDi test
  • Units for current density is settable in preferences.
  • You can do single path simulations as worst case for pad voltage rise and path resistance. In the solverview, right under the test checkbox you can choose between single and multiple path simulations. Single path simulates only the main discharge path, i.e. the path that will trigger first. Single path simulation runs faster (by about 2x) than multi-path with less convergence problems and in general tends to overestimate voltage rise in the pads and path resistances because only a single current path is considered. So it could be used as a safe, worst case simulation.
  • The p2p metal resistance of the most active path is shown in the test tab of the ESDi summary. If you don’t see it immediately, right click the title bar of the test tab to add the column.
  • The user can set the font of the GUI in the preferences.

Known issues and workarounds in ESDi:

  • Crash when running it on Centos 7.3 (#5084)
    • Workaround: Remove libfontconfig lib in the installation, such that the system libs are used.
    • PROMPT> cd $MAGWELDIR/lib
    • PROMPT> rm libfontconfig*
  • (#3146): When undoing manual viaclean when 2D view/field view is open, there is a crash

Flow doing only R extraction, without valid table models, is impossible since the start button is disabled. Workaround, is to provide valid I(V)