Artwork Analysis Tools for VLSI Circuits.

TLDR: Current methods of designing Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) chips do not insure that the chips will perform correctly when manufactured, so some better method is needed to catch all of the errors.

Abstract: : Current methods of designing Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) chips do not insure that the chips will perform correctly when manufactured. Because the turnaround time on chip fabrication varies from a few weeks to a few months, a scheme other than try it and see if it works is needed. Checking of chips by hand simulation and visual inspection of checkplots will not catch all of the errors. In addition, the number of transistors per chip is likely to increase from ten thousand to over a million in the next few years. This increase in complexity precludes any manual verification methods; some better method is needed. A series of programs that use the actual mask descriptions for input are described. These programs perform various levels of checks on the masks, yielding files suitable for simulation. Some of the checks are the usual 'design rule' checks of looking for minimum line widths and adequate spacing between wires. However, there are many more constraints in VLSI circuits than are expressed by usual design rules. The programs check these constraints using the mask descriptions as input. All of the errors mentioned so far can be classified as syntactic errors; in addition, certain errors are detected. The detection of semantic errors requires various levels of simulation. The input to the simulators is derived from the artwork.