A Genuine Design Manufacturability Checker for Integrated Circuit Designers

by Philippe Hurat SPIE Newsroom, accessed 13 Jun 2006 Until recently, integrated circuit design was based on the following contract between design and manufacturing: designs are to follow a set of manufacturing-driven constraints (design rules), and manufacturing is to meet the performance and yield targets in producing the specified design. This arrangement worked for many years until the designs of sub-100nm nodes came along, when the optical proximity effects started to affect systematic and parametric yields severely, despite ever-improving resolution enhancement technique methodologies. As a result, design rules were not manufacturable, and several design techniques -- known collectively as design for manufacturing -- were deployed to attempt to restore the contract. Read more