Pattern Matching Rule Ranking Through Design of Experiments and Silicon Validation
Pattern Matching Rule Ranking Through Design of Experiments and Silicon Validation
Tuesday, October 30, 2018: 10:35 AM
Exhibit Halls A/B (Phoenix Convention Center)
Summary:
Continued technology scaling has led to exposure of many ‘weak-points’ in the designs fabricated in some of the most advanced technology nodes. Weak-points are certain layout patterns which are found to be sensitive to process non-idealities and have a higher tendency to cause defects. They may be coded in the form of Pattern Matching (PM) rules and included within the Design for Manufacturability Guidelines (DFMGs) to ensure product manufacturability. Often, during Integrated Circuit (IC) design, a trade-off is made between meeting performance specifications and complying with DFMGs. As a result, designs may reach the fab with some DFMG violations. Fixing such violations generally causes a ‘ripple effect’ where one change requires many changes in higher metal layers, making the process tedious. Therefore, providing a ranked list of guidelines to the designers helps them to assess the criticality of violations and prioritize fixing them accordingly. Past research suggests using diagnosis data to determine the impact of DFMG violations. However, this is a reactive approach wherein DFMGs are ranked only based on their hard-defect causing nature. To make the ranking process more robust, we propose a proactive silicon validation based approach which not only considers the yield loss due to hard-defects but also takes into account the parametric and reliability degradation caused by DFMG violations. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology through on-silicon experiments on an advanced Fully-Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FD-SOI) technology node.
Continued technology scaling has led to exposure of many ‘weak-points’ in the designs fabricated in some of the most advanced technology nodes. Weak-points are certain layout patterns which are found to be sensitive to process non-idealities and have a higher tendency to cause defects. They may be coded in the form of Pattern Matching (PM) rules and included within the Design for Manufacturability Guidelines (DFMGs) to ensure product manufacturability. Often, during Integrated Circuit (IC) design, a trade-off is made between meeting performance specifications and complying with DFMGs. As a result, designs may reach the fab with some DFMG violations. Fixing such violations generally causes a ‘ripple effect’ where one change requires many changes in higher metal layers, making the process tedious. Therefore, providing a ranked list of guidelines to the designers helps them to assess the criticality of violations and prioritize fixing them accordingly. Past research suggests using diagnosis data to determine the impact of DFMG violations. However, this is a reactive approach wherein DFMGs are ranked only based on their hard-defect causing nature. To make the ranking process more robust, we propose a proactive silicon validation based approach which not only considers the yield loss due to hard-defects but also takes into account the parametric and reliability degradation caused by DFMG violations. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology through on-silicon experiments on an advanced Fully-Depleted Silicon-On-Insulator (FD-SOI) technology node.