If you can't build it, it isn't worth much: designers and eda vendors developed design for-manufacturing, design-for-test, and design-for-yield methods to improve a design's chances for success

摘要

LITHOGRAPHY TECHNOLOGY has crossed the boundary between visible light and ultraviolet light, and, at around 193 nm, new classes of problems began to impact IC designers. Figure 1 shows the band on the electromagnetic spectrum currently used for almost all semiconductor fabrication. As long as the semiconductor industry used processes with nominal feature sizes within the visible light spectrum, designers who respected the design rules published by their foundry of choice could reasonably expect that their designs would present no manufacturing challenges. Even then, as ICs grew in complexity, testing devices could be problematic, so both designers and EDA vendors developed DFT (design-for-test) methods. (Reference 1). These methods made it possible to test devices and to avoid the limits that the packaging and memory capacity of testers impose.