Evolutionary Engineering Collaboration for DFM/DFY Solutions between Foundry and EDA Tool Vendor

With the migration to deep-submicron technology, foundries face even more challenges than ever to help their customers to develop IC for time-to-market. The goal of this research is then to explore how foundries and EDA tool vendors collaborate with each other for DFM/DFY solutions. By conducting field interviews and empirical study on two leading foundries and three EDA tool vendors, this research summarizes four aspects of collaboration activities, which are design problem, design scope, released information, and collaboration mechanism, under three different collaboration stages. Results of the study show that in the era of DFM, both parties have expanded their collaboration activities, from post-design manufacturing stage to all stages of design. In addition, the collaboration pattern has transformed from input-output coordination to know-how sharing and then to know-how creation in 90nm technology. The study concludes that as design automation and process technology become more advanced, the value of reference flow becomes higher.