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Peter Rabkin, Michael Hart & Daniel Gitlin, Xilinx, Inc., San Jose, California

ABSTRACT

Leading fabless companies produce designs for cutting edge technologies almost on a par with leading integrated device manufacturers (IDMs). Foundries have
evolved from making devices one to three nodes behind IDMs to funding leadingedge R&D and manufacturing chips using the most advanced processes. The key
fabless/foundry challenge – how to produce manufacturable designs for cutting edge technology nodes to meet time-to-yield and time-to-volume requirements – is
being overcome by an extensive effort broadly called Design For Manufacturability (DFM). Different from IDM requirements, fabless DFM requires addressing a number
of additional issues, such as obtaining and utilizing proprietary manufacturing information in the course of the design. That, in turn, requires deep understanding
of process-to-design interactions, new process characterization and modeling methodologies, EDA tools, data structures, process models, encryption techniques,
etc. Solving these issues and enabling sufficient information flow between design and manufacturing is critical for the overall competitiveness of the fabless/foundry
business model. Therefore, leading design houses, foundries and EDA vendors are aggressively moving into the DFM arena to provide either proprietary or more
general answers to the DFM challenges [1, 2, 3, 4]. There is also a movement within the industry toward open standards for DFM models, data structures, and
encryption [5, 6, 7]. Making manufacturing information more readily available for fabless users, introducing common standards for DFM models, tools and data
structures are undoubtedly useful steps.