Design for manufacturability: a path from system level to high yielding chips

This tutorial describes a wide spectrum of the Design for Manufacturability (DFM) activities. We start by presenting a new approach to IC design, which takes full advantage of leading edge technology. Then we propose a new methodology for acceleration of yield ramping which accounts for all the dominant yield loss mechanisms and a set of software tools that have been developed to address the yield learning problems. Several real-life examples demonstrate the practical results of employing such a yield ramping strategy.