CMP

This case study shows how rising CMP simulation quality can be leveraged to detect the position and type of planarity hotspots before manufacture and verify the planarity of a layout.

Hierarchical signoff strategies for large SoCs at advanced nodes can be effective if sufficient attention is paid to reflecting the impact of cross-hierarchy parasitics.

Designers have been using dummy fill to address design for manufacturing for some time, but the process of simply wallpapering shapes into a design's "white space" to help it maintain planarity can no longer cope with the complex challenges presented at today's advanced process nodes. Not only is planarity harder to maintain, but there are [...]

The article offers a case study of the DFM planning and methodology applied during a shrink of Cambridge Silicon Radio's UF6000 system-on-chip from the 130nm to 65nm.

Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) has traditionally been considered an enabling technology. It was first used in the early 1990s for BEOL metallization to replanarize the wafer substrate thus enabling advanced lithography, which was becoming ever more sensitive to wafer surface topography. Subsequent uses of CMP included density scaling via shallow trench isolation and interconnect formation […]