May 30, 2012 -- Mentor Graphics Corp. today announced that TSMC will use the Calibre SmartFill solution to achieve TSMC's fill requirements for its 20-nm manufacturing processes. SmartFill analysis and automatic-filling capabilities in the Calibre YieldEnhancer product address new 20-nm fill requirements that cannot be achieved with traditional dummy-fill approaches. The Calibre SmartFill solution delivers smaller post-fill GDS database size and faster run-times, allowing designers to meet IC fill constraints in a single pass without manual customization or modification, and with minimal impact on circuit performance.

New capabilities for advanced fill requirements

The move to more advanced nodes has pushed fill requirements beyond traditional fill approaches. In addition to improving planarity, fill now needs to handle CMP-ECD, etch, lithography, stress and rapid thermal annealing (RTA). A more advanced solution must deal with those effects concurrently and still provide ease of use and design flow integration.

The SmartFill capability in the Calibre YieldEnhancer product provides advanced capabilities such as multi-layer fill shapes and user-defined fill cells that are automatically inserted into a layout based on analysis of the design. It also supports continuous, multi-dimensional functions in place of linear pass-fail conditions, enabling finer resolution of complex fill algorithms that cannot be performed with single-dimensional design rules alone. This allows users to simultaneously optimize for multiple factors such as density and perimeter.

The SmartFill solution fits into existing design environments with back-annotation of fill shapes into all leading design databases to support final timing verification. It also allows users to define a list of critical nets that require special treatment during the fill procedure.

"We continue to work with Mentor to meet new fill challenges as we move to each successive process node," said Suk Lee, TSMC Senior Director, Design Infrastructure Marketing Division. "At 20nm an effective fill strategy is important for successful manufacturing. Calibre's integrated fill analysis and cell-based approach makes fill more precise and makes writing fill decks easier, while achieving target run-time and output file size."