Volume 2

December 1, 2005

Meeting yield enhancement challenges

Nanometer scaling severely inhibits the path to achieve sustainable yield. In response more responsibility for forecasting potential failures must shift to design for manufacturing (DFM) methodologies that can be applied early in the design process. Yet, while these hold much promise, manufacturing test and failure analysis remains at the forefront of determining why chips fail. […]

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June 1, 2005

The ultimate wish-list

If you want to get a clear idea of just what is taxing engineers at any given time, you can do a lot worse than following the trends that emerge before each annual Design Automation Conference (DAC). “And this year, it is pretty clear that there are three things on everyone’s mind: power, system-level design […]

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June 1, 2005

The whole picture

Once upon a time, placing even the smallest question mark next to Moore’s Law was seen as something beyond heresy. Today, more and more people are voicing such thoughts in the mainstream. One of the most senior figures speaking out is Bernard Meyerson, vice president and chief technologist of IBM’s Systems & Technology Group. The […]

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June 1, 2005

Achieving better DFM: EDA tools pave the way to improved yield

Major yield-Inhibiting Issues At each successive process node, additional defect mechanisms appear and hinder the ability to achieve desired yield (Figure 1). The trend toward declining yields has led to a resurgence in the application of design for manufacturing (DFM) methodologies.Much of this reinvigorated effort relies heavily on a new breed of tools and technologies. […]

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June 1, 2005

A methodology of integrated post tape-out flow for fast design to mask TAT

Semiconductor devices are being fabricated with features that are less than half the wavelength of the available lithography exposure tools. Increasing circuit density has improved the complexity and performance of ICs but also led to serious patterning proximity effects. These effects make the chips almost impossible to fabricate without optical proximity correction (OPC) technology. Thus, […]

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June 1, 2005

Formal verification poised for rapid growth

Design teams are becoming increasingly concerned at the growing disparity between the capacity of silicon in the latest processes and the design and verification capabilities of simulation tools. A number of trends are now converging to enable a step function increase in verification to complement and extend the debug and verification capabilities of HDL simulators. […]

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June 1, 2005

Improving team productivity with efficient data management for SoC designs

The efficient management and synchronization of design data is now a necessity and no longer something that is a ‘nice-to-have’. Design complexity continues to increase with one result being that development spreads across several groups (often in different places). A project may also have several thousands design files generated by various tools from different vendors […]

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June 1, 2005

Destination network-on-chip

The network-on-chip (NoC) design paradigm is seen as a way of enabling the integration of an exceedingly high number of computational and storage blocks in a single chip. But its adoption and practical implementation face important and unsolved issues related to design methodologies, test strategies, and dedicated CAD tools. The System-on-a-Chip Research Lab at the […]

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June 1, 2005

Innovate in volume

If one thing has become clear as process geometries have gone below one micron, it is that the traditional development model is broken. It seems only recently that companies were talking about adopting a greater ‘customer focus’, but even the linear sequence of first, finding out what the client wants; second, getting your designers to […]

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June 1, 2005

Micro-architecture exploration for deep submicron design

Alcatel Space supplies complete satellites for use in geostationary and low-earth orbit as well as custom designs for specific missions. These are based on various in-house platforms which support different payloads according to their final use. Fields serviced include telecommunications, observation, meteorology, navigation and science. The company has 5,600 employees, of which around 2,000 work […]

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