VLSI physical design analyzer: A profiling and data mining tool

Traditional physical design verification tools employ a deck of known design rules, each of which has a pre-defined pass/fail criteria associated with it. While passing a design rule deck is a necessary condition for a VLSI design to be manufacturable, it is not sufficient. Other physical design profiling decks that attempt to obtain statistical information about the various critical dimensions in the VLSI design lack a systematic methodology for rule enumeration. These decks are often inadequate, unable to extract all the interlayer and intralayer dimensions in a design that have a correlation with process yield. The Physical Design Analyzer is a comprehensive design analysis tool built with the objective of exhaustively exploring design-process correlations to increase the wafer yield.