PHYSICAL DESIGN AND DESIGN AUTOMATION OF FREEZE METAL-INTERCONNECTION-LAYER ECO ROUTING

• Main Authors: Chun-wei Huang, 黃峻維
• Other Authors: Yaw-Fu Jan
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/15149838180663067688

碩士 === 大同大學 === 電機工程學系(所) === 99 === ECO routing is a key step in back-end place-and-route EDA tool. Right after functional ECO, a designer incrementally re-routes the IC design by re-connecting the new and broken nets due to ECO circuit reconstruction. Usually, due to time-to-market pressure at late design phase, Fully-ECO, Metal-Only ECO and Focused Ion Beam are selectively adopted to speed-out a chip’s production. Re-using and preserving existing routes like metal wires and vias in a design are becoming critical and important for better timing convergence and saving cost of lithography masks. However, many of current back-end tools do not fully support the feature of re-use-and-preserve existing routes, especially on lower metal layers. The cost of lithography mask synthesis on these lower layers is much higher than the others above. In this thesis, a new solution on freeze-layer ECO routing is proposed. It includes an automatic tracking and re-naming script utility and recommended routing methodology that ECO router can preserve and utilize the wire and via at lower layers. The experimental results show that the proposed ECO script utility and methodology save the manufacturing cost on lower mask layers and also optimize the design routes to achieve more possibility and layers for freeze-layer ECO routing.