The business impact of
product quality is reflected in key metrics such as market share and revenue
growth, profit margin, brand equity and customer satisfaction. Achieving and
maintaining complex product quality is an increasing challenge as time to market
shrinks and performance increases in nanometer technologies. EDA has a
significant role to play in enabling high product quality, including
quality-by-design with full manufacturing awareness in the design flow from
micro-architecture to mask layout; the validation of product quality as products
get tested in the manufacturing floor; and the closed loop corrective action to
DFM infrastructure driven by yield diagnostics.
Plenary Speech 1P.2
Tuesday, March 27
9:45am-10:15am
Tipping point for new design technologies: DFM, low
power and ESL
Semiconductor scaling has
been driven by advances in both transistor and process technology, and may
continue for the next decade down to 5~7 nm of gate length. In this context, it
is necessary to predict how design technology will continue to exploit the added
capability afforded by semiconductor scaling in coming years. Although
predicting the future is extremely difficult, the best way is to review the past
and to assess the key factors in the successes. First of all, this talk will
review how three main design technologies - DFM (Design for Manufacturing), low
power design, and ESL (Electronic System Level) design - achieved success in
industry. In particular, such industry success will be considered from the
tipping point perspective: how a technology can be widely adopted by designers.
Success factors include the inherent quality of each design technology as well
as the effort required to adapt and disseminate the technology for the product
differentiation. As evidence for success, the talk will cite several innovative
examples wherein Samsung designers applied the new design technologies to
differentiate their products. Finally, this talk will conclude by anticipating
another tipping point of emerging design technologies for the next decade while
considering semiconductor business aspects as well as the future direction of
SoC technology.