V. Chowdhury, Y. Ada, V. Girish, R. Irfan, Altera Corp., San Jose, CA

Summary: Even though manufacturing design rules exist for a production process technology, good manufacturing practice requires that these be constantly reviewed in the light of ongoing learning and experience acquired through failure analysis and yield enhancement efforts.Traditionally, it is the foundries that have been primarily responsible for managing yield. As technologies advance to finer geometries, yield tends to become product specific. A partnership between back end design, failure analysis, EDA4 and fabrication engineers will become increasingly important to achieve yield objectives.