Design-Manufacturing Interface: Part I - Vision

This paper proposes a vision for a new research domain emerging on the interface between design and manufacturing of VLSI circuits. The key objective of this domain is the minimization of the mismatch between design and manufacturing which is rapidly growing with the increase in complexity of VLSI designs and IC technologies. This broad objective is partitioned into a number of specific tasks. Often, one of the most important task is the extraction of VLSI design attributes that may be relevant from a manufacturing efficiency standpoint. The second task is yield analysis performed to detect process and design attributes responsible for inadequate yield. This paper postulates both, an overall change in the design-manufacturing interface, as well as a methodology to address the growing design-manufacturing mismatch. Attributes of a number of tools needed for this purpose are discussed as well. The design-manufacturing interface can be seen as having evolved through three distinct phases. In Phase I, design and process development were conducted by the same small group of experts who could tune the process design interface using all available " knobs " on both sides of the design-manufacturing border. This phase ended in the early 1970s, due to the large increase in the volume of ICs manufactured, and in the diversity of products fabricated on a single fab-line. Such increases prevent a simple centralized control of design/manufac-turing operations. Another very important factor was the widespread adoption of simple design rules, enabling very efficient design automation but, at the same time, preventing fine tuning of designs. In the second phase (still continuing in some places at present) design and manufacturing have been separated as much as possible to allow for " process independent " and, consequently, efficient design. The best measure of success of this trend is the emergence of fabless design houses which can perform efficient design with limited access to proprietary manufacturing data. The third phase has just begun. To characterize this phase, it is useful to consider a timing factor which relates the key events of design with those of manufacturing. In Phase 2 this timing was simple-manufacturing process evolution was relatively well-synchronized with the ability of the design domain to absorb opportu-nities/restrictions provided by the newer versions of manufacturing processes. A simplified scenario of this " symbiotic " relationship is summarized in Fig. 1. In this scenario, the design of product " i " is guided by a …