A comparison of extra material critical area extraction methods

The paper reports a comparison of efficient methods of estimating extra material critical area of any angled IC layout using three different techniques: shape shifting and dot throwing and sampling. All of these techniques are implemented using the same polygon libraries and are optimised to make best use of the library features. This allows an accurate comparison of the techniques with minimal dependence on the specific implementation. The results presented here indicate that the shape shifting technique is considerably more efficient in the analysis of smaller circuit layouts but does not scale well to larger designs. For general yield prediction of large chips an efficient dot throwing implementation can be used but a sampled extraction is as much as an order of magnitude faster