Self-compensating design for focus variation

Process variations have become a bottleneck for predictable and high-yielding IC design and fabrication. Linewidth variation (ΔL) due to defocus in a chip is largely systematic after the layout is completed, i.e., dense lines "smile" through focus while isolated (iso) lines "frown". In this paper, we propose a design flow that allows explicit compensation of focus variation, either within a cell (self-compensated cells) or across cells in a critical path (self-compensated design). Assuming that iso and dense variants are available for each library cell, we achieve designs that are more robust to focus variation. Design with a self-compensated cell library incurs ∼11-12% area penalty while compensating for focus variation. Across-cell optimization with a mix of dense and iso cell variants incurs ∼6-8% area overhead compared to the original cell library, while meeting timing constraints across a large range of focus variation (from 0 to 0.4μm). A combination of original and iso cells provides an even better self-compensating design option, with only 1% area overhead. Circuit delay distributions are tighter with self-compensated cells and self-compensated design than with a conventional design methodology.