VLSI Design for Manufacturing: Yield Enhancement

1. Yield Estimation and Prediction.- 1.1. Introduction.- 1.2. The VLSI Fabrication Process.- 1.3. Disturbances in the IC Manufacturing Process.- 1.3.1. Process Disturbances.- 1.3.2. Process Related Deformations of IC Design.- 1.3.2.1. Geometrical Deformations.- 1.3.2.2. Electrical Deformations.- 1.3.3. General Characteristics of Process Disturbances.- 1.3.4. IC Performance Faults.- 1.4. Measures of Process Efficiency.- 1.4.1. Yield Estimation.- 1.4.2. Yield Prediction.- 1.4.3. Decomposition of the Design Yield Equations.- 1.5. Discussion.- 1.5.1. Relationships Between Manufacturing and Design Yields.- 1.5.2. Examples of Yield Analysis.- 1.5.3. Yield and Production Cost.- 1.6. Overview of the Sequel.- 2. Parametric Yield Maximization.- 2.1. Introduction.- 2.1.1. Definitions of Yield and Design Center.- 2.1.2. Design Centering By Simplicial Approximation.- 2.1.3. Design Centering Procedure.- 2.1.4. Scaling: Inscribing a Hyperellipsoid.- 2.1.5. Illustration of the Basic Method.- 2.2. Design Centering and Worst Case Design with Arbitrary Statistical Distributions.- 2.2.1. Norm Bodies and PDF Norms.- 2.2.2. Generalized Simplicial Approximation.- 2.2.3. Mixed Worst-Case Yield Maximization.- 2.2.4. Tolerance Assignment.- 2.3. Example of Worst Case Design.- 2.4. A Dimension Reduction Procedure.- 2.4.1. Design Centering in a Reduced Space.- 2.4.2. Discussion.- 2.5. Fabrication Based Statistical Design of Monolithic IC's.- 2.5.1. Independently Designable Parameters in Yield Maximization of Monolithic IC's.- 2.5.2. Process Simulation and Yield Maximization.- 3. Statistical Process Simulation.- 3.1. Introduction.- 3.2. Statistical Process Simulation.- 3.2.1. Methodology.- 3.2.2. Modeling of Process Disturbances.- 3.2.3. Process and Device Models for Statistical Simulation.- 3.2.4. Models of Ion Implantation.- 3.2.5. MOS Transistor Model.- 3.2.6. Structure of the Simulator.- 3.3. Tuning of Process Simulator with PROMETHEUS.- 3.3.1. Mathematical Formulation.- 3.3.2. Methodology of Solution.- 3.4. The Process Engineer's Workbench.- 3.4.1. Process and Device Simulation.- 3.4.2. User Interaction-Process Synthesis.- 3.4.3. Internal Data Structures.- 3.4.4. User Interaction - Compiled Simulation.- 3.4.5. Extensions.- 4. Statistical Analysis.- 4.1. Statistical Timing Simulation.- 4.1.1. Overview.- 4.1.2. Our Approach.- 4.1.2.1. Timing reevaluation.- 4.1.3. Characterization.- 4.1.4. Delay decomposition.- 4.1.5. Nominal Simulation.- 4.1.6. Statistical Simulation.- 4.2. An Improved Worst-Case Analysis Procedure.- 4.2.1. Worst-Case Analysis Methodology.- 4.2.1.1. Algorithm for Worst-Case Analysis.- 4.2.2. A Software Package for Worst-Case Analysis.- 4.2.3. Examples.- 4.3. Optimal Device and Cell Design Using FABRICS.- 4.3.1. Proposed Methodology.- 4.3.2. Description of Experiment.- 4.3.3. Building the Regression Model.- 4.3.4. Performance Optimization.- 5. Functional Yield.- 5.1. Introduction.- 5.2. Basic Characteristics of Spot Defects.- 5.2.1. Defect Mechanisms.- 5.2.2. Defect Spatial Distribution.- 5.2.3. Distribution of Defect Radii.- 5.2.4. Distribution of Defect Radii Within Layer.- 5.3. Yield Modeling Using Virtual Layout.- 5.3.1. Critical Area.- 5.3.2. Spot Defect Related Yield Losses.- 5.3.3. Yield Losses Due to Lateral Process Deformations.- 5.3.4. Critical Area Computation Using Virtual Layout.- 5.3.5. Examples of Application of the Virtual Layout Method.- 5.4. Monte Carlo Approach to Functional Yield Prediction.- 5.4.1. The VLASIC Yield Simulator.- 5.4.2. Fault Analysis.- 5.4.3. VLASIC Implementation and Summarizing Discussion.- 5.5. Yield Computations for VLSI Cell.- 5.5.1. Probability of Failure (POF) for Simple Layout Patterns.- 5.5.2. POF for Macrocells.- 5.5.3. Implementation.- 6. Computer-Aided Manufacturing.- 6.1. Motivation.- 6.2. Overview of the CMU-CAM System.- 6.3. Statistical Process Control: The Unified Framework.- 6.3.1. Profit Function.- 6.4. CMU-CAM Software System.- 6.4.1. Decomposition.- 6.4.2. Modeling for Process Control.- 6.4.3. Statistical Quality Control.- 6.4.4. Acceptance and Rejection Criteria.- 6.4.5. Feed Forward Control.- 6.5. Computational Examples.- 6.5.1. Yield Enhancement.- 6.6. Conclusions.- References.