Interoperability beyond design: sharing knowledge between design and manufacturing

The nature of IC design is necessarily evolving to a more data-centric design flow in which EDA tools share a common information in a design database without the negative cost and quality impacts of data translation from sequential files. In support of this new paradigm, a collection of mainstream companies within the IC supply chain have sponsored the development of an open industry data model and application program interface for IC design tools, along with a database that fully implements this. This technology, called OpenAccess, is now available and being adopted by the IC design community. Another industry effort is in operation with the goal of greatly improving the cost and efficiency for IC photomasks. That effort is exploring a new paradigm similar in nature to OpenAccess in that a common data model and data access language is proposed. This data model would span both the design and mask-making communities, and possibly expand into wafer fabrication over time. Thus, it has become known as the Universal Data Model (UDM). This paper discusses some of the rationale for the UDM and highlights the attributes of the OpenAccess technology that make it the ideal base on which to build an open industry UDM.