DFM Lacks Consistency, Adds Cost

By Ed Sperling -- Electronic News, 7/28/2006 6:30:00 AM

Design for manufacturing may have been the highlight of this year’s Design Automation Conference, but there’s an inherent problem in the DFM world: No standards yet exist for data formats.
 
While the goal may be turning chip designs into ones that can be quickly and flawlessly manufactured, the data flowing back and forth between foundries and designers will vary greatly from one EDA vendor’s tools to the next and from one foundry to the next. And because of the complexity of the chips themselves, DFM almost certainly will add cost, time and the need for more people to the equation.
 
“What we need is an independent standard DFM format,” said Walter Ng, senior director of platform alliances at Chartered Semiconductor. “EDA companies need to think about more than just point technologies.”
 
Ng said that no foundry or designer can support every EDA vendor’s DFM tools, and many of them are being written to exclude others from the market. “It’s all the same data, but it’s in different formats. …This is not yet a huge problem because we’re still identifying which tools are real and which ones aren’t. But when we start integrating solutions, that’s when we’re going to see a problem.”
 
TSMC, for example, has its own unified format for data. While that works inside of TSMC, it doesn’t mean the same recipe will work at another foundry, said Chuck Byers, director of brand management at TSMC. “Our manufacturing data is TSMC specific,” he said. “If you ask whether you can transfer a mask from one foundry to another, the answer is, no.”
 
Nancy Wu, a Gartner analyst, said that developing standards will be particularly hard between foundries, and sometimes may be difficult even within the same foundry. She said that each EDA company asks for different data, and that what designers using their DFM tools get back is a completely different recipe from each foundry. While that may improve yield and reduce defects, the results will be inconsistent from one chip to the next and from one foundry to the next.
 
“Most designers are aware of the DFM issue,” she said. “But what they are looking for does not exist yet.”
 
Wu said it may never exist. But she said there is a price tag for DFM, no matter whose tools or data are used. She said the minimum cost of adding DFM into the design process appears to be about $3 million. “This is not something startups can jump on,” she said.