( ESNUG 461 Item 1 ) -------------------------------------------- [01/31/07]
Subject: ( ESNUG 459 #1 ) Cadence vs. new Blaze DFM for dummy metal fill
> My boss asked me to investigate the new Blaze DFM dummy metal fill tool.
> I tried a search on DeepChip, but found very little about Blaze. Do you
> know any Blaze customers I could talk to? My boss is curious how Blaze
> metal fill differs from Cadence metal fill -- especially for TSMC 65 nm
> (& maybe UMC 65 nm). Is the tool worth the extra budget $$$?
>
> - [ Chicken Man ]
From: [ A Cadence Employee ]
Hi, John,
You should tell Chicken Man the big difference between Cadence metal fill
and Blaze metal fill is that ours works and has been used 1000's of times
on production silicon. Blaze can't say that.
Keep me anon of course.
- [ A Cadence Employee ]
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: Artur Balasinski <afb=user domain=cypress not balm>
Hi, John,
We're one of the beta sites for the Blaze IF intelligent fill tool. After
extensive simulations, we decided to fab 3 versions of an image sensor
testchip on a 130 nm process. The 1st version had no fill; on the 2nd, we
used an aggressive geometric fill strategy with our internal home-grown
tools; on the 3rd, we used Blaze IF.
The Blaze result was not only 2X better than our un-filled version, but it
also left our home-grown aggressive geometric fill in the dust.
Our metrics were the extracted values of (oxide) metal pattern density
which turned out to be extremely well aligned with the inter-layer
dielectric thickness variation on silicon. Our target was to contain
the thickness variation, from the original 40% to a more acceptable
level of 30%; the Blaze version delivered under 15% (!).
The simulation results from using Blaze IF looked promising so we decided
to fabricate silicon comparing our in-house tool with the Blaze fill. What
we measured in silicon was a 57% reduction in ILD thickness variation from
using Blaze IF compared with our own in-house waffling tool.
- Artur Balasinski
Cypress Semiconductor San Diego, CA
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