| Abstract | For many generations the hand-off between design and manufacturing has been done by a set of design rules. However, design rule manuals have grown in size from several tens of pages a few generations back to hundreds of pages now. Many more design rules have been added since the end of traditional scaling. Even with all these additional rules, corner cases are found late in the process that can become significant yield or functionality detractors. Restricted Design Rules (RDRs) have been created to simplify the design rules and come up with more manufacturable designs. IBM has practiced RDRs in the last few process generations but is this enough? For the next technology nodes no new exposure tools will be available for mass production and optical scaling is coming to a halt. Computational scaling will be required to extend Moore’s law. In this new era, can we keep on describing design rules in terms of restrictions or do we need another approach? |