Featured Articles
Profiling Defect Sites for Yield Improvement
Profiling defect sites is a technique made simple with the development of pattern matching. A suspect location may be broken down into the individual patterns of its whole, enabling designers to perform analysis on each pattern to identify which pieces may be robust or problematic to manufacture. There are multiple ways to perform defect-site profiling: breaking up pieces of a site into different hierarchies based on repeated structures or specified features, using an area/ density-based algorithm to split up a site into pieces, or covering a design with a grid and taking window clippings of the design for each grid space. Whatever method is used, the key is to define a simple, yet distinct, feature such that the design team will be able to identify most, if not all, potential locations of defects.
Read the entire article from Mentor Graphics Corp. on SOCcentral.
The New Standard for 32/22-nm IC Physical Design and Sign-Off
With the advent of advanced process nodes, IC design teams have an increasing ability to pack more functionality and performance into state-of-the art SOCs. However, design challenges are growing as we push the limits of complexity, size, power reduction, and manufacturing scaling. Designers need a new generation of physical design tools to effectively address these issues. Starting at 45/40nm, the increasing complexity of DRC and DFM rules began to stress traditional physical design flows. This trend is expected to continue and worsen at the 32-nm and 22-nm nodes, where manufacturing closure may become a serious bottleneck in design schedules.
Read the entire article from Mentor Graphics Corp. on SOCcentral.
Seeing Is Believing: How Visualization Simplifies IC DRC
As physical features and ICs shrink, lithographic and field effects expand, resulting in more numerous and often subtle design-for-manufacturing (DFM) issues. Simple linear spacing, length and width measurements between adjacent features are no longer sufficient. IC design rules now must take into account many three-dimensional geometric measurements related by complex functions to determine if a design is manufacturable at leading-edge process nodes.
Read the entire article from Mentor Graphics Corp. on SOCcentral.
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