DfY Design for Yield
Virtual Characterization and Silicon Qualification
Design methods and EDA solutions must ensure that design is not the cause of yield drops during fabrication. Traditional approaches are based on worst case analysis which results in adding margins, thus increasing area or reducing performances. Recent technological processes have made this approach obsolete as electrical and topological dispersions become paramount: worst case design is no longer acceptable! Traditional simulations do not provide the appropriate functionalities needed to address this challenge.
Innovative features and solutions as "Sensitivity Locate", "Imbalance Locate" and “SHAKER” enable Virtual Characterization of analog, logic, memory… at electrical level for increasing design robustness.
Key Benefits
- To guarantee design robustness with respect to statistical parameter variations
- To accelerate diagnostic of yield losses in fabrication
- Flexible integration of electrical or topological variations from foundry data
- “Sensitivity Locate” to identify the contribution of each device to on-chip dispersion
- “Imbalance Locate” to diagnose design yield losses due to process dispersion
- “SHAKER” for iterating simulations on process worst cases and worst conditions
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Definitions
“On-Chip dispersion” is defined as variations of characteristics between two identical devices, inside the same chip, after fabrication, with the result of matching issues.
“Process dispersion” is defined as the variation of device characteristics across different fabrication lots, with the result of circuit performance variation
“Voltage offset” is one specific consequence of dispersion to be dealt with using specific algorithms.
Description of the solution
SMASH provides a framework-free point-product to automatically address:
the need for efficient analyses to increase robustness of the design to on-chip dispersion and process dispersion,
the diagnostic of yield drop upon fabrication by reproducing dispersion effects and analyzing their impact through simulation.
Such features in SMASH make it possible to perform both dispersion impact diagnostic and design speed-up and check-out thanks to unique and patented algorithms.
Don’t wait to SMASH your bugs ! 
< SMASH Options
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