Patterns of behaviour [Electronics Design]

SINCE THE end of the 1990s, the semiconductor industry has worked on finding ever more sophisticated ways of drawing tinier and tinier features on the surface of silicon wafers. The wavelengths of light used can now be five times longer than the features themselves because it has proven too difficult and expensive to move from deep ultraviolet wavelengths around 200nm long to the extreme ultraviolet range. Even in the late 1990s, feature sizes rapidly approached the wavelength commonly used in lithography 248nm. As feature sizes get closer to the source wavelength, diffraction around the mask elements gets worse. The blurring caused by this diffraction threatened to distort the on-chip features or even make them disappear in some cases, rendering the integrated circuit (IC) unusable.Pattern matching can let us return to using something more intuitive. Pattern-matchingtechnology makes it possible to identify, isolate and define specific geometric configurations visually. Once recognised and defined, these patterns can be added to a pattern library that can be used by a pattern matching engine to automatically scan designs for matching patterns.