Fable: A programming-language solution to IC process automation problems

Abstract

The Stanford University Center for Integrated Systems is embarking on an ambitious project to formally characterize integrated circuit fabrication processes, and to provide a degree of automation of research and prototyping activities in the IC fabrication facility. A crucial component of this project is the ability to represent an IC fabrication “recipe” in a repeatable, transportable, device-independent fashion. We have designed the language Fable for this purpose: it offers some novel approaches to abstraction and modularity. We describe the problem, explain why we were forced to devise a new language rather than use an existing language, describe important properties of the Fable language, and give several examples.