A Student-Centered Learning Approach to Design for Manufacturability: Meeting the Needs of an Often- Forgotten Customer

A hands-on learning module was implemented at Marquette University in 2012 to teach biomedical engineering students about basic manufacturing processes, lean manufacturing principles, and design for manufacturability. It incorporates active and student-centered learning as part of in-class assembly line simulations. Since then, it has evolved from three class periods to five. The module begins with two classroom presentations on manufacturing operations and electronics design, assembly, and testing. Students then participate in an in-class assembly line simulation exercise where they build and test an actual product per written work instructions. They reflect on this experience and suggest design and process changes to improve the assembly line process and quality, save time, and reduce cost and waste. At the end of the module students implement their suggested design and process improvements and repeat the exercise to determine the impact of their improvements. They learn of the importance of Design for Manufacturability, well-written work instructions, process design, and designing a product not only for the end user, but also for the assemblers and inspectors. Details of the module, and its implementation and assessment are presented along with student feedback and faculty observations

A Hands-On, Active Learning Approach to Increasing Manufacturing Knowledge in Engineering Students

This paper describes a new learning module implemented as part of the senior capstone design course at Marquette University to teach engineering students about basic manufacturing processes, lean manufacturing principles, and design for manufacturability. The module includes several examples of active and student centered learning as part of an in-class assembly line simulation exercise. Students reflected on this experience, and suggested process improvements to save time, reduce cost and waste, and improve the assembly line process. They learned of the importance of manufacturing documentation, process design, and design for assembly. At the end of the module, students understood the importance of designing a product not only for the end user, but also for the assemblers and inspectors. Details of the module design and implementation will be presented along with comments from students

Under-the-cell routing to improve manufacturability

The progressive miniaturization of technology and the unequal scalability of the BEOL and FEOL layers aggravate the routing congestion problem and have a negative impact on manufacturability. Standard cells are designed in a way that they can be treated as black boxes during physical design. However, this abstraction often prevents an efficient use of its internal free resources. This paper proposes an effective approach for using internal routing resources without sacrificing modularity. By using cell generation tools for regular layouts, libraries are enriched with cell instances that have lateral pins and allow under-the-cell connections between adjacent cells, thus reducing pin count, via count and routing congestion. An approach to generate cells with regular layouts and lateral pins is proposed. Additionally, algorithms to maximize the impact of under-the-cell routing are presented. The proposed techniques are integrated in an industrial design flow. Experimental results show a significant reduction of design rule check violations with negligible impact on timing.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

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

On Regularity and Integrated DFM Metrics

Transistor geometries are well into the nanometer regime, keeping with Moore's Law. With this scaling in geometry, problems not significant in the larger geometries have come to the fore. These problems, collectively termed variability, stem from second-order effects due to the small geometries themselves and engineering limitations in creating the small geometries. The engineering obstacles have a few solutions which are yet to be widely adopted due to cost limitations in deploying them. Addressing and mitigating variability due to second-order effects comes largely under the purview of device engineers and to a smaller extent, design practices. Passive layout measures that ease these manufacturing limitations by regularizing the different layout pitches have been explored in the past. However, the question of the best design practice to combat systematic variations is still open. In this work we explore considerations for the regular layout of the exclusive-OR gate, the half-adder and full-adder cells implemented with varying degrees of regularity. Tradeoffs like complete interconnect unidirectionality, and the inevitable introduction of vias are qualitatively analyzed and some factors affecting the analysis are presented. Finally, results from the Calibre Critical Feature Analysis (CFA) of the cells are used to evaluate the qualitative analysis