Intel's 45nm CMOS Technology

  Section 3 of 12  

45nm Design for Manufacturing

DESIGN FOR MANUFACTURING GOALS

The first requirement for a new technology is the continuation of Moore's Law. A new technology should have twice the number of transistors. This is increasingly difficult with the lack of improvement in wave length for lithography and in transistor scaling issues. Keeping manufacturing variation in check as we improve transistor density is a scaling challenge as discussed in many papers and conferences [4, 5]. Transistor channel length is a major focus for controlling manufacturing variation. The variation must scale with the poly pitch for the new process.

The second requirement of a new technology is the ability to ramp very quickly to high volume with multiple designs in multiple fabs. The design and process have to be manufacturable at the beginning of the ramp. Design rules have to be defined early in the process development work to allow product design to be done in parallel with the process development. There must be no major changes to design rules late in process development or during manufacturing ramp. Predictive modeling of the rules must be done well before process development is complete. The design rules may be conservative, to ensure that the design is very robust, but they should not be too conservative, to ensure that we derive the maximum benefit from Moore's Law scaling. The challenge is in defining this optimum robustness.

The third requirement of a new technology is for its yields to be as good as, or better than, the previous-generation technology; and for its learning curve to be as fast as, or faster than, the previous-generation technology. Judgment is required to define the technology to strike the right balance between the difficulty of the technology and the impact of the DFM requirements on the design. Some breakthroughs may be required to meet design requirements, but these cannot be so difficult that they slow the yield learning goal.

  Section 3 of 12  

Back to Top