The growing process integration complexity at each technology node has increased development time and cost, and this trend looks to continue. There is a looming risk of delivering unrepeatable critical unit processes (or process modules) that would require revisiting development and manufacturing requalification or in … Read More
Cadence has a new white paper out about the changes in IC design that are coming at 20nm. One thing is very clear: 20nm is not simply “more of the same”. All design, from basic standard cells up to huge SoCs has several new challenges to go along with all the old ones that we had at 45nm and 28nm.
I should emphasize that the paper… Read More
Introduction
When I designed DRAM chips at Intel I wanted to simulate at the worst case process corners to help make my design as robust as possible in order to improve yields. My manager knew what the worst case corners were based on years of prior experience, so that’s what I used for my circuit simulations.… Read More
I like to say that “you can’t ignore the physics any more” to point out that we have to worry about lots of physical effects that we never needed to consider. But “you can’t ignore the statistics any more” would be another good slogan. In the design world we like to pretend that the world is pass/fail. But manufacturing is actually a statistical… Read More
