Design Tools for Emerging Technologies

Proceedings IEEE Conference on Semidconductor Processes and Devices, pages 1–4, Sept. 2006.

• des_tools_emerg_tech.pdf

The rapidly expanding diversity of technology available at the nanoscale is disrupting the existing transistor-centric microelectronics design paradigm, resulting in nearly decade-long delays between prototype demonstration and technology deployment. The key to reducing these innovation-inhibiting delays is to develop algorithmic approaches that can start with first principles based descriptions of novel nanotechnology and rapidly and reliably synthesize manufacturable designs. Design tools are evolving this direction, with new extremely efficient yet customizable physical simulators, automatic parameterized low-order model extraction, and ever improving algorithms for robust optimization-new techniques that generate manufacturable designs by optimizing both system performance and robustness to manufacturing variations. In this paper we give a few examples of the coupling of such approaches, but mostly offer pointers to literature for researchers interested in contributed to this rapidly growing field of coupled simulation and robust optimization.