Model based metal fill tool

Overview

GTsmooth is a high performance metal fill tool, performing dummy tile insertion for chips and wafers to limit the effects of Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP). GTsmooth is a complete environment for metal-fill, which comes with all the modules needed for efficient dummy tile insertion. GTsmooth minimizes the number of inserted tiles to reduce induced parasitic effects.

Main features

3D analysis of wafer surface with accurate estimation of CMP effects.
Wafer level analysis. Chip is analyzed in its environment (scribe lines, other chips...).
Optimized patented metal fill algorithm working with the 3D analysis software
Optimized dummies instantiation method
Models available as user defined plugins (C libraries)
Powerful 2D and 3D viewing capability of density and thickness variation
Optimized resulting GDSII/OASIS database size at chip
Fully scriptable for integration in any design flow

Key benefits

Maximum factory yield, with metal-fill depending on local chip thickness variation
Minimum parasitic effects, by limiting the number of inserted tiles
Chip and wafer capable, due to tool's large capacity and optimized database size
Highly flexible: process independent thickness estimator, fully customizable by user
Enables to take dummy effects into account early in the design process due to fast computation

Model based flow

Metal-Fill in the design flow

Patented filling algorithm

At the heart of GTsmooth is a patented filling algorithm which optimizes the tiles distribution in critical areas.

User defined estimation function

As opposed to other model-based metal-fill tools, GTsmooth is highly flexible and can be used for any process. By default GTsmooth identifies the areas to fill with XYALIS’ post-CMP thickness estimation function. But GTsmooth offers a plug-in mechanism, which allows design and process engineers to use their own estimation function or a function provided by their foundry as part of the design kit, to drive the filling algorithm. Engineers can use the function that best describes the effects of CMP on their process.

3D viewing of post-CMP thickness

Performance

GTsmooth has been optimized in terms of speed, memory and disk usage. This allows designers to perform the metal-fill early in their design process, and take into account the possible induced parasitic effects.

GTsmooth is able to manage the largest databases, since it directly operates on zipped or compressed files. Special optimizations in the filling algorithm have been developed in order to minimize the size of the generated GDSII/OASIS databases.

Supported platforms

SUN Sparc Stations, 32 and 64 bits, Solaris 2.5 and + HP HPUX 11.x x86 PC Linux RedHat 3 and + x86-64 PC Linux RedHat 3 and + ItaniumII Linux RedHat 3 and +