VoroCAA is a new CAD tool for the extraction and analysis of the Critical Area of a VLSI design based on the mathematical concept of a Voronoi diagram. Critical Area is a measure reflecting the sensitivity of a VLSI design to random defects occurring during the manufacturing process. The ability to accurately and quickly extract critical area is essential for VLSI manufacturing especially when Design for Manufacturability (DFM) changes to chip designs are being considered with the purpose of improving yield. The Voronoi diagram is a powerful mathematical object that encodes proximity information in a compact form. Based on several variations of Voronoi diagrams, our tool extracts the critical area of a layout both accurately and fast. Supported defect mechanisms include shorts, opens, via-blocks, and combination faults
Development
The tool has been developed in close collaboration between the Design Automation Department at IBM Research and the Electronic Design Automation Organisation at the IBM Systems & Technology Group. It extracts critical area for shorts, opens, via-blocks, and combination faults. New abilities and enhancements are under development.
Last updated 3 Feb 2006