INCORPORATING A VLSI FABRICATION DATABASE INTO A CAD FRAMEWORK A Thesis

by Eric W. Johnson With the development of improved fabrication processes, more responsibility is placed on circuit designers to develop circuits that are tolerant of fluctuations in the fabrication process. To achieve this higher reliability, designers must have access to actual data variations in the fabrication process. Historically, this process data has been collected from test measurements taken during the fabrication process and stored in a database. Although the data is available, it is unattractive to designers because the structure of manufacturing databases differs from the structure of design databases. The goal of this research was to develop a clean mechanism for integrating design data with manufacturing data. This goal was accomplished by identifying a technique to incorporate an external database into the task management system of a Computer Aided Design (CAD) framework. The technique was verified by incorporating a VLSI fabrication database into the Odyssey CAD framework.