DFM in Perspective - A Challenge and Opportunity in Nanometer Era -

The old good days, when the process and the design engineers were in each technology silo and didn't need to interact frequently, have gone. As the device size shrinks to nanometer scale and the integration level exceeds well over giga scale, the landscape of technology developments has become very different from the past. The variability, for example, becomes a critical issue not only for performance, but also for production yield. The problems, which have been seen as secondary for long time, suddenly come into play and will grow according to the device size reduction. The solution is DFM, Design For Manufacturing. The DFM will not be done without collaborations between various technology parties, such as process, design, mask, EDA, and so on. The DFM will give us a big challenge and opportunity in nanometer era. In this talk, the perspective of the DFM will be presented and how the work-flow for making chips should be changed will be discussed. The DFM initiative under a collaborative consortium scheme in Japan will also be presented.