The evolution of design for manufacturing

This paper considers the development of the design for manufacture efforts in electronics manufacturing. While there were many distinct efforts in the 1980s, only one, the manufacturability rating system addressed the needs of the electronics manufacturing community. While the methodology was successfully applied within the larger manufacturing companies, the effort was not able to be sustained. Today´s environment demands a complete approach to solving the challenges in competing in a global market. The semiconductor industry of 1995 has demonstrated the need to develop a systematic approach to a total solution. Solutions to this identified need in semiconductors can be the basis of solutions for the electronics industry in general. The designs of semiconductor devices relies heavily on automated functions to provide the increasing complexity of circuits. Somewhere about the early 1980s it became impossible to attempt a semiconductor design without automated tools as the number of transistors increased over 10000 on a single device. The capability of the manufacturing process (circuit complexity) in semiconductors is increasing at the rate of almost 60% per year. In comparison, the design tool productivity has been increasing at the rate of about 20% per year. The major challenge is this gap between manufacturing capability and design tool capability that will result in a problem for the industry if the needs are not addressed. This paper considers the enhancements that need to be developed in order to solve this challenge