Recent Research and Emerging Challenges in Physical Design for Manufacturability/Reliability

As IC process geometries scale down to the nanometer territory, the industry faces severe challenges of manufacturing limitations. To guarantee yield and reliability, physical design for manufacturability and reliability has played a pivotal role in resolution and thus yield enhancement for the imperfect manufacturing process. In this paper, we introduce major challenges arising from nanometer process technology, survey key existing techniques for handling the challenges, and provide some future research directions in physical design for manufacturability and reliability.