ULSI design-for-manufacturability: a yield enhancement approach

Yield enhancement is a quintessential objective of the semiconductor industry. With diminishing feature size and increasing chip area, the amount of “functional” silicon on a chip is too expensive to discard in the event of short- and open-circuit faults. Designing chips with high tolerance against faults, therefore, holds great promise for profitable manufacturing in the semiconductor industry. In this paper, we present an algorithm for integrated circuit yield enhancement in the routing phase of layout synthesis. The focus is on detailed routing. The proposed algorithm reduces layout critical area for short circuits due to two-dimensional spot defects. Critical area reduction is achieved in both horizontal and vertical layers without any penalties on net length or channel density. Results show yield improvement of 15-25% from the application of the proposed algorithms