Developed specifically to address the signal integrity issues in today’s high-speed Integrated Circuit (IC) package designs, Icemax provides substrate designers and electrical analysts with an easy-to-use and highly automated modeling environment, seamlessly integrated with CAD data from major EDA layout vendors. Icemax is powered by advanced geometry processing engines and Fluent’s flagship finite volume 3-D field solver, thereby facilitating quick and accurate parasitic extraction of complex (IC) package layouts.

Bret Zahn, Vice President of Chippac Inc. states, "We, at Chippac Inc. have been very impressed with the performance of Icemax compared to our current tools. We are dramatically overloaded with large electrical models and needed a tool that could perform characterization runs faster (i.e. hours instead of days). Using Icemax, we were able to cut down the simulation times by a factor of five or more, without sacrificing accuracy. It has been possible to perform full package extractions for our multichip packages, including complicated Ground/Power nets, in a reasonable amount of time."

The Icemax graphical user interface (GUI) is tailored for the demands of the design environment in terms of intuitiveness, responsiveness, and usefulness to the IC package designer. The Icemax GUI is designed to automatically import package layouts from EDA software, specify the relevant inputs for RLC extraction, and generate reports and outputs in standard SPICE, IBIS, and ASCII table format. Chip designers can directly use this output to study signal and power integrity effects such as crosstalk, timing delay, ground bounce, simultaneous switching noise etc.