TABLE OF CONTENTS Design for manufacturability (DFM) in the context of integrated circuit design is a broad topic that covers a number of activities, all loosely connected by their intention to improve yield. Clearly, no one sets out to design against manufacturability. Instead, many design methods have tended to ignore manufacturability and treat yield as a problem to be solved by the wafer fabrication facility (fab) or foundry. This has happened both in vertically oriented organizations and in fabless environments, but it has been worse in the latter. In some ways, this has been a direct result of progress in the semiconductor industry. Future progress now depends on reversing this trend.
In this chapter, we first provide some background information and historical context for DFM and show how it fits into the modern semiconductor industry. Next, we introduce and define the concept of yield, introduce a variety of yield models, and show how these models can be used to quantify the benefits of repairable circuit elements. This is followed by an introduction to the basic concepts of photolithography. All these concepts are then combined, and we show how they interact for both DFM and design for yield (DFY). We also show their relationship with design for testability (DFT). Following this discussion, we introduce process variation and its relationship to DFM, DFY, and DFT. The combination of these topics is known as DFX, where "X" stands for...
