The importance of DFX, a foundry perspective

Silicon foundries are enabling fab-less chip design companies to meet market demand of highly integrated devices as mobile applications are flourishing in recent years. Foundries are also enabling other sectors of the semiconductor industry to provide high performance systems to meet the required bandwidth for mobile applications. Significant investments in the development of advanced technology nodes are made to ensure future demand are met. This makes Fab utilization of high importance. This paper discusses the importance of DFX (DFT, DFM, DFB, DFA) disciplines to accelerating technology bring up and enabling fast customer volume ramp up. We show how basic and advance DFT methodologies are used to design and test special structures to enable fast failure analysis identifying design and manufacturing constraints. We also discuss the role of DFX in failure analysis in improving the design and manufacturing rules.