A comparison of efficient dot throwing and shape shifting extra material critical area estimation

The paper reports a comparison of efficient methods of estimating extra material critical area of any angled IC layout using two different techniques, shape shifting and dot throwing. Both techniques are implemented using the same polygon libraries and are optimised to make best use of the library features. This allows an accurate comparison of the techniques with minimal dependence on the specific implementation. The results presented here suggest that for general yield prediction an efficient dot throwing implementation is best suited for layouts of any significant size (designs greater than 1 MB of layout data). However, the shape shifting technique is considerably more efficient in the analysis of smaller circuits but does not scale well to larger designs.