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Product Briefing Outline: Takumi Technology Corp. has launched two new products designed to optimize IC physical design and enhance yields. Named Takumi Inspect and Takumi Enhance, these new tools detect, rate and automatically repair hot spots in sub-90nm designs.

Problem: Escalating price competition and shrinking market windows are forcing
IC designers to ensure that every design works right the first time, so improving design yield and ramp-up time are essential to market success. While manufacturers have adopted OPC to mitigate sub-wavelength problems in sub-90nm designs, it still does not guarantee hot spot-free designs and high yields.

Solution: Takumi Inspect is a layout analysis software tool that detects yield-impacting problems in GDSII layouts that are not detected by DRC or DFM rules and then rates them in terms of their probability of failure. Takumi Inspect analyzes the layout and then, within a single environment, rates potential problems by taking into account a wide range of manufacturing issues that impact yield and robustness including those related to RET/OPC, lithography, random defects, systemic defects, and manufacturing tolerances. The second tool, Takumi Enhance, is an automated physical design optimization system that rates GDS layouts for potential failures, prioritizes the failure mechanisms, and uses advanced optimization techniques to concurrently repair the layout against multiple failure mechanisms to provide hot spot-free designs. Enhance operates on GDSII layout data to detect, rate and automatically repair hot spots based on critical area, single contact hole or via printability and edge placement errors (EPE) due to misalignment margins and contrast issues. In addition, a user can develop a custom criticality rating function using a powerful language-based interface. All of these ratings are performed using foundry-specific defect data. Takumi Enhance can also use information generated from other third-party pre- or post-OPC verification tools to drive Takumi's fast 2D layout optimization engine.

Applications: Takumi Inspect is used for issues related to RET/OPC, lithography, random defects, systemic defects, and manufacturing tolerances. Takumi Enhance operates on GDSII layout data to detect, rate and automatically repair hot spots.

Platform: Pricing starts at $200,000, depending on the configuration.
 
Availability: July 2006 onwards.