Doug Stiles et al.
Microsoft, Pyxis, Ponte Solutions, and PDF Solutions

As design teams continue to drive forward with the use of advanced process technologies, there has been much discussion about the use of design-for-manufacturing (DFM) techniques. This paper describes an experiment conducted to establish the quantitative performance and yield impact of proactively using DFM techniques during the routing of a design.

The design used in the experiment is an established production device for which both performance and yield are known. A methodology for seamlessly introducing DFM into the routing is presented, including the impact of DFM on the performance of the design. Also shown is a strategy for making quantitative comparisons of predicted yield between non-DFM and DFM versions of the design and the results from those comparisons for this experiment. The results demonstrate better performance and a predicted yield improvement of greater than 7%.