Simplify to survive: prescriptive layouts ensure profitable scaling to 32nm and beyond

TLDR: The time-to-market driven need to maintain concurrent process-design co-development, even in spite of discontinuous patterning, process, and device innovation, is reiterated and shortcomings in traditional Design for Manufacturability solutions are identified.

Abstract: The time-to-market driven need to maintain concurrent process-design co-development, even in spite of discontinuous patterning, process, and device innovation is reiterated. The escalating design rule complexity resulting from increasing layout sensitivities in physical and electrical yield and the resulting risk to profitable technology scaling is reviewed. Shortcomings in traditional Design for Manufacturability (DfM) solutions are identified and contrasted to the highly successful integrated design-technology co-optimization used for SRAM and other memory arrays. The feasibility of extending memory-style design-technology co-optimization, based on a highly simplified layout environment, to logic chips is demonstrated. Layout density benefits, modeled patterning and electrical yield improvements, as well as substantially improved layout simplicity are quantified in a conventional versus template-based design comparison on a 65nm IBM PowerPC 405 microprocessor core. The adaptability of this highly regularized template-based design solution to different yield concerns and design styles is shown in the extension of this work to 32nm with an increased focus on interconnect redundancy. In closing, the work not covered in this paper, focused on the process side of the integrated process-design co-optimization, is introduced.