Ralph J. Williams

Integrated Manufacturing and Development (IMaD)

This article describes an IBM-developed parallel software methodology called Integrated Manufacturing and Development (IMaD). IMaD is a super-scalable AIX application written in the C programming language and makes use of the Message Passing Interface (MPI). It is built specifically to support Product Engineering (PE) for full-scale integrated circuits (IC), like microprocessors, and encompasses failure, yield, and reliability design and analysis. Because an IC is constructed of smaller building-block circuits, many aspects of its behavior are learned from a local analysis of some subset of the IC. However, there are global aspects of an IC-such as its power-grid electrical distribution that require a full-scale formulation, solution, evaluation, and visualization. This sets the stage for some very large problems that demand enormous computational and memory resources. In answer to these demands, IMaD provides a parallel processing solution that incorporates novel methods of both topographic partitioning of the IC and of solving the global electrical simulation equations.