Development of a design intent extraction flow for mask manufacturing

The cost of photomasks has been rising year by year as the process node gets finer and the mask cost is becoming one of the headaches in the semiconductor industry. For the purpose of the mask cost reduction, ASET started Mask D2I (Mask Design, Drawing and Inspection Technology) project in 2006. In earlier papers[1-4], we introduced the idea of photomask data prioritization method which is referred to as Mask Data Rank (MDR). We have built our software system to convert Design Intent (DI) to MDR with cooperation of STARC. Then we showed the results of preliminary experiments with mask data provided by STARC. In this paper we explain the software mechanism of design intent extraction flow. Then we show the experimental results with actual chip data in three semiconductor companies and address the related issues. Finally we introduce a new idea to extract design intent from analog circuits.