As I travel a lot in the last 15 years and visited customers as well as friends I was many times invited to talk to the Layout teams. The main purpose is always to encourage automation. So I developed a presentation related to market trend, technology trends, and latest tools advancements. In many cases I present updates from DAC (Design Automation Conference), to which I am a big fan participating for more than 20 years. From Memory to Analog and Digital Place & Route in all cases the first question was:
Is there anything else we can do other than just layout? What is my future? What can I do to grow faster? What did you do?
Everybody is afraid that there is nothing else but schematic to layout or Netlist to P&R and their life will be as monotone as a production line work. Nothing more wrong to think about.
In the last 3 years I decided to add an answer to this question and everywhere I talk to layout and design teams I reveal this in a last 20 minutes. So I decided this time to share this is with all of you so you will be able to act before I come to visit your company and present. Will write a series of articles describing the tools in which I was involved as a Layout Designer, from internal to external. Will use approximate timeframe, as some happen 30 years ago, and will provide some context of the condition that enabled such involvement. Will add names of people who actually did the work, or managed it as I was only the instigator, advisor, or tester in many cases.
There are a few condition that favorited my involvement in these developments:
[LIST=1]
First step in starting my non-layout involvement was from an error. We taped out a chip verified and qualified “free of errors” but it came back with a short. As most of the work in 1984 was in multiples of microns polysilicon size 45 degree polygons where not needed. At that time the technology had only 1 (one) metal routing and we did route 45 degrees but not poly (which was used for GATE and for routing). However somebody used poly in 45 degree and the verification deck did not cover that. On the screen we could see the error between ad poly/metal 1 contact distance to a 45 degree poly as “below accepted distance” but in silicon was a real short. MSIL was only doing development using all verification decks provided by Austin, TX. After that date Zvi decided that we should have our own verification calibration done locally. So from the CAD department was assigned a very new software expert, Karina (later married Ben-Tvi) who needed a layout person to build all layout test cases for verification. Guess what, even so this was a simple task, below an interesting layout challenge, I volunteered thinking that this can widen my horizon.
This was my first experience outside “layout” and working with Karina was a pleasure. We started daily meetings to figure out how to do this as no documentation was available, and we were doing it, kind of“under the table”. After about 3 months we had our own MSIL DRC deck. But with good food comes more appetite for automation. By end of 1985 we had additional checks not related to manufacturing but related to “good layout design practices”… Some of you may be aware that DRC and LVS actually have an underline ERC running, specifically these days with multiple voltages supplies. We developed our first SOFT CHECK by connecting one piece of diffusion at 2 difference voltages (text base) and found out a new verification that Motorola did not have. We proposed it to the headquarters and this is when they learnt that we have our own calibration in-house. As we had metal gates for input/output buffers (!) we added verification for that also, as the corporate delivered them “as is” and we were not allowed to modify them. After that working with CAD became a routine. Calma language was called GPL and we (all the layout team) wrote some small scripts to open the chip (it was taking one (1) hour to open top level, to add text, to move screens for routing, etc. But none of us was really trained for software and working with CAD proved to be a solid extension of capabilities.
More about how a layout designer can have “spice” in their profession next time.
Dan Clein
CMOS IC Layout Concepts, Methodologies and Tools
Also Read: Is there anything in VLSI layout other than pushing polygons? (2)
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