Manufacturing clarity

Leading foundry TSMC has unveiled its latest steps to reduce uncertainty over meeting design for manufacture (DFM) requirements. Its Reference Flow 8.0, targeted at designs up to 45nm and unveiled at last week’s Design Automation Conference, includes for the first time an automatic DFM design fix feature. “We have been in a ‘green-amber-red’ kind of situation and obviously designers have wanted more clarity. It’s important that we are now really offering that in terms of physical DFM,” said Tom Quan, deputy director for design service marketing at TSMC. At the same time, the foundry has launched its Active Accuracy Assurance initiative, which will be based on marrying and intense data mining of its manufacturing data with the tools supplied by partner EDA vendors and in house software used by major clients. Both Reference Flow 8.0 and the AAA scheme mark a new phase in an often tense relationship between TSMC and its clients and eda partners over the degree of visibility it has offered into its proprietary manufacturing processes. “There are still issues over how the data is interpreted and imported into tools,” said Rajeev Madhavan, ceo of TSMC partner Magma Design Automation. “But the good thing is that the question is now more about the use of the data rather than what we do and do not have.” Both Quan and Madhavan said that further refinements to the DFM component of TSMC’s main flow are required in terms of electrical DFM.