Methodologies and infrastructure needed from pre-silicon to manufacturing.
As IC designs get larger and manufacturing processes get more complex, the semiconductor industry finds itself needing new solutions to prevent the propagation of systematic defects, streamline product cycle time and deliver high-quality, reliable chips. Traditionally, engineers have improved performance, power efficiency, density and cost through design-technology co-optimization (DTCO) techniques that bring end-product metrics to bear on design and technology choices.
However, these traditional approaches don’t connect design and manufacturing data through the entire flow; there are still ‘walls’ between modules along the way that block the smooth feedback and feed forward of data. The result is that the traditional DTCO is no longer enough to ensure the design is free of the more frequently occurring systematic failures tied to complex design-process interactions.
In this paper, we introduce an extended DTCO platform called Calibre Fab Solutions with systematic information exchange and analytics overarching various design-to-manufacturing modules with complete lifecycle support. We describe the methodologies and infrastructure necessary to feed pre-silicon design data and intelligence forward into the manufacturing process, and feed manufacturing information back, post-silicon, to inform the design process.
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