DFM

Antun Domic of Synopsys tackles the three key challenges of 20nm processes: design complexity; the physics of lithography; and economics.

A guide to emerging 3D integration techniques for ICs, including a look at various approaches, and some of the tools and standards issues involved.

How Cadence, Intel and Xuropa accelerated the semiconductor design process by squeezing 15% more capacity out of a virtualized server farm

Using a new design-partitioning tool and stacked-silicon interconnect FPGA to develop an ASIC prototyping platform that can be reprogrammed several times a day.

There's still debate over certain aspects of the 20nm node, but the main challenges are already being addressed. Expect to see foundries and vendors mark their turf at DAC.

Guest blogger Jeff Wilson discusses some of the subtleties involved in the effective use of dummy fill in deep sub-micron IC designs.

Correlating production test failure diagnosis with DFM analysis can help identify and understand systematic yield issues, and to find out whether they are linked to DFM violations.

Using UML to define a software-defined modem SoC in terms of decoupled constraints - the order of activities, the timing they have to meet, and the available resources

It may be necessary to move to three-dimensional 'FinFET' transistors for future process nodes, but what impact will this have on circuit design?

Fully depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) transistor architectures may offer speed and power advantages, at the cost of a shift to non-standard substrates.