6 research outputs found
A High-Performance Triple Patterning Layout Decomposer with Balanced Density
Triple patterning lithography (TPL) has received more and more attentions
from industry as one of the leading candidate for 14nm/11nm nodes. In this
paper, we propose a high performance layout decomposer for TPL. Density
balancing is seamlessly integrated into all key steps in our TPL layout
decomposition, including density-balanced semi-definite programming (SDP),
density-based mapping, and density-balanced graph simplification. Our new TPL
decomposer can obtain high performance even compared to previous
state-of-the-art layout decomposers which are not balanced-density aware, e.g.,
by Yu et al. (ICCAD'11), Fang et al. (DAC'12), and Kuang et al. (DAC'13).
Furthermore, the balanced-density version of our decomposer can provide more
balanced density which leads to less edge placement error (EPE), while the
conflict and stitch numbers are still very comparable to our
non-balanced-density baseline
Layout Decomposition for Quadruple Patterning Lithography and Beyond
For next-generation technology nodes, multiple patterning lithography (MPL)
has emerged as a key solution, e.g., triple patterning lithography (TPL) for
14/11nm, and quadruple patterning lithography (QPL) for sub-10nm. In this
paper, we propose a generic and robust layout decomposition framework for QPL,
which can be further extended to handle any general K-patterning lithography
(K4). Our framework is based on the semidefinite programming (SDP)
formulation with novel coloring encoding. Meanwhile, we propose fast yet
effective coloring assignment and achieve significant speedup. To our best
knowledge, this is the first work on the general multiple patterning
lithography layout decomposition.Comment: DAC'201
Methodology for standard cell compliance and detailed placement for triple patterning lithography
As the feature size of semiconductor process further scales to sub-16nm
technology node, triple patterning lithography (TPL) has been regarded one of
the most promising lithography candidates. M1 and contact layers, which are
usually deployed within standard cells, are most critical and complex parts for
modern digital designs. Traditional design flow that ignores TPL in early
stages may limit the potential to resolve all the TPL conflicts. In this paper,
we propose a coherent framework, including standard cell compliance and
detailed placement to enable TPL friendly design. Considering TPL constraints
during early design stages, such as standard cell compliance, improves the
layout decomposability. With the pre-coloring solutions of standard cells, we
present a TPL aware detailed placement, where the layout decomposition and
placement can be resolved simultaneously. Our experimental results show that,
with negligible impact on critical path delay, our framework can resolve the
conflicts much more easily, compared with the traditional physical design flow
and followed layout decomposition
DSA-aware multiple patterning for the manufacturing of vias: Connections to graph coloring problems, IP formulations, and numerical experiments
In this paper, we investigate the manufacturing of vias in integrated
circuits with a new technology combining lithography and Directed Self Assembly
(DSA). Optimizing the production time and costs in this new process entails
minimizing the number of lithography steps, which constitutes a generalization
of graph coloring. We develop integer programming formulations for several
variants of interest in the industry, and then study the computational
performance of our formulations on true industrial instances. We show that the
best integer programming formulation achieves good computational performance,
and indicate potential directions to further speed-up computational time and
develop exact approaches feasible for production
High performance algorithms for large scale placement problem
Placement is one of the most important problems in electronic design automation (EDA). An inferior placement solution will not only affect the chip’s performance but might also make it nonmanufacturable by producing excessive wirelength, which is beyond available routing resources. Although placement has been extensively investigated for several decades, it is still a very challenging problem mainly due to that design scale has been dramatically increased by order of magnitudes and the increasing trend seems unstoppable. In modern design, chips commonly integrate millions of gates that require over tens of metal routing layers. Besides, new manufacturing techniques bring out new requests leading to that multi-objectives should be optimized simultaneously during placement.
Our research provides high performance algorithms for placement problem. We propose (i) a high performance global placement core engine POLAR; (ii) an efficient routability-driven placer POLAR 2.0, which is an extension of POLAR to deal with routing congestion; (iii) an ultrafast global placer POLAR 3.0, which explore parallelism on POLAR and can make full use of multi-core system; (iv) some efficient triple patterning lithography (TPL) aware detailed placement algorithms