Performance-manufacturability tradeoffs in IC design

Abstract

Traditional VLSI design objectives are to minimize time-to-first-silicon while maximizing performance. Such objectives lead to designs which are not optimum from a manufacturability perspective. The objective of this paper is to illustrate the above claim by performing performance/manufacturability tradeoff analysis. The basis for such an analysis, in which the relationship between a product's clock frequency and wafer productivity is modeled, is described in detail. New applied yield models are discussed as well.