Fill Solutions Are Getting Smarter
As the industry begins production at 45-nm geometries, one of the issues that needs to be resolved is that of planarity—the flatness of the IC after chemical-mechanical planarization. At 45nm and below, fill solutions become much more challenging, because manufacturing processes and physical interactions become more sensitive to small metal density variations.
A big part of the problem is that the allowable thickness variation has remained constant at +/-15%, even while the total thickness of wires has decreased. This dichotomy means that the percentage of total … Read More → "Fill Solutions Are Getting Smarter"