Design for manufacturability and statistical design encompass a number
of activities and areas of study spanning the integrated circuit design and
manufacturing worlds. In the early days of the planar integrated circuit, it was
typical for a handful of practitioners working on a particular design to have
a fairly complete understanding of the manufacturing process, the resulting
semiconductor active and passive devices, as well as the resulting circuit -
often composed of as few as tens of devices. With the success of semiconductor
scaling, predicted and - to a certain extent even driven - by Moore’s law, and
the vastly increased complexity of modern nano-meter scale processes and the
billion-device circuits they allow, there came a necessary separation between
the various disciplines.
