DFM debate rages on over foundry data

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- Electronic News, 6/6/2007

In one of the most contentious debates so far at this year’s Design Automation Conference, a panel of EDA and IP vendors, a fabless semiconductor company and a lone foundry took to the stage to discuss how the semiconductor and adjacent industries, namely EDA and test, can improve communication between design and manufacturing.

This discussion surrounding has been going on for some time concerning whether or not the fabs and foundries of the world are releasing data in order for EDA tool vendor to help designers realize the true promise of design for manufacturing.

On one hand, if you believe Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing’s Walter Ng, who is senior director of platform alliances, sufficient information and model data is available, although he admits it does depend on what type of company is asking for it. Ng noted that if you are a small EDA tool startup, it is less likely that a foundry or IDM is going to be able to make the business case to support you, as the resources needed are just not there. Therefore, foundries work with EDA’s leading vendors: Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor and Magma, as well as its work with the Common Platform process technology.

Ultimately, Ng pushed it back to the EDA community. “A sufficient amount of data is available now to support model-based DFM capabilities. The challenge now is on the EDA side, in terms of, ‘You asked for it, now you got it, how are you going to use it?’ That’s a big problem because it’s not only driven by technical challenges, it’s driven by business challenges that the EDA companies can’t seem to get beyond amongst themselves. … The business motivations of these companies need to be aligned with what the users want and the industry needs and in reality, until customers speak out [there won’t be a real DFM] solution.”

On the other hand, Dr. Greg Yeric, DFM technologist at Synopsys said, “We’ve got multiple customers with multiple opinions and we have a lot of work to do [as an industry] to get these complex physical mechanisms in from process into electrical uses.

“I don’t believe that the data is available. The data is available in certain cases like the PDF-type work where you are characterizing layer defectivity. But to drive the variation block in HSPICE, statistical timing and spatial models, that data is in the science project stages at a couple of the IDMs in the industry but there is a lot of work to be done to really drive these issues,” he said.

Yeric did later tell Electronic News that the foundries do a much better job in terms of working with EDA providers than IDMs.

From another perspective, Magma Design Automation’s Ankush Oberai, manager of the company’s fab analysis business unit agrees with Ng that the data is available, but it is in the correlation of the data to the design process that needs work at this point.

In the end, where DFM is real and happening now in the truest sense is in the area of test. Bob Madge, director of strategic planning at LSI Corp. pointed out that design, test and fab data is being used now to implement optimum design rules.