According to the companies, the environment will provide a link between Brion's lithography modeling and optical proximity correction (OPC) products, enabling mutual customers to reduce cost, time and risk in ramping to new process nodes.

"Our corporate visions are well aligned and our joint goals aggressive because the market is moving quickly to smaller process nodes," said John Lee, general manager of Magma's physical verification business unit, in a statement. "With this partnership, both companies are ready to meet the demands of today's designers."

Magma and Brion, both headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., said the creation of the partnership was driven by the IC industry's need for more accurate and efficient OPC software and for less complex, less costly methods of abstracting lithography effects into design flows. The companies plan to offer methods to decrease design variability, while increasing parametric and catastrophic yield, they said.

An environment based on Magma's Talus, Quartz DRC and Quartz LVS and Brion's Tachyon Focus-Exposure Modeling, Tachyon Lithography Manufacturability Check and Tachyon OPC+ can reduce cost, time and risk in ramping to newer process nodes, according to the companies. The design flow is intended for current customers and integrated device manufacturers implementing designs at the 65-, 45- and 32-nanometer process nodes, or those developing lithography-based design-for-manufacturability (DFM) flows, the companies said.

A common design environment combining Talus, Quartz DRC/LVS and Tachyon is intended to ensure that lithography effects are accurately modeled through each phase of the design flow. Along with reducing timing variability, this environment will decrease leakage power variability and lithography hot spots prior to tape-out, according to the companies. Information will be passed from Blast Fusion to Tachyon-FEM, Tachyon LMC and Tachyon OPC+ to allow the computational lithography flow to optimize runtime and mask cost while minimizing variability, the companies said.

The companies plan to provide more details about the common modeling environment here during the Design Automation Conference next week.