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%.