Design for Manufacturability and Reliability in Nano Era

The bottom line of any company is to maximize the profit from any given product. There are many factors influencing the product design resulting in a profitable business. One of the biggest factors is the manufacturability of the product. It is becoming more and more crucial to meet the 6+6 (6 months for the development and 6 months for qualifying the product to ship to customer) product life cycle to accommodate the rapid changing technology hungry market demand. Smooth, reliable, and efficient product ramp through manufacturing is the key of success for meeting TTM, capturing higher percentage of total available market (TAM). This tutorial is going to address the difficulties industries are facing today in designing manufacturing friendly highly complex giga-scale products in submicron technology. As we are heavily into deep submicron era, the error margin or the tolerance guard band is getting tighter and tighter with respect to the previous generation of fabrication process. On this note, it is important to pay attention to Design For Manufacturing (DFM) related issues early in the design cycle as oppose to later in the design. These include, however not limited to, all kinds debugging hooks in the design for easy debugging of billion of transistors in a given design, paying attention to manufacturing friendly physical design rules, making sure of adequate test coverage to toggle most of the design nodes, making sure optimal guard band is implemented for transistor degradation for the lifetime of the product, and last but not least, all reliability (ESD, EM/SH, LU, etc) related issues are resolved in pre-silicon design before Tape out. In the past, manufacturing issues were not given much attention; time has changed and designers must have to be more sensitive than ever before in addressing manufacturing related issues early in the design cycle. In a nut shell, this tutorial will capture the must have knowledge for design engineers (irrespective of front-end or back-end) who are involved in high performance VLSI design, as DFM features moving upstream in the design cycle. Audience will walk out with a good understanding on how to integrate specific manufacturing concerns into a product’s design to obtain a product that is easier to manufacture with excellent overall quality in a shortest development time.