Patent US 10,445,461

The present disclosure provides a method to maximize the overall chip yield. This method combines a PV-aware deterministic circuit sizing process with a hybrid OPC operation, and integrates them into an analog layout migration platform, which attempts to efficiently compose a layout by inheriting knowledge from a legacy layout and imposing new specifications, circuit sizing and constraints. The present method provides a sizing process, which explores robust circuit sizes under different PV conditions, especially considering mismatch effects on sensitive analog devices. The analog layout migration is conducted along the sizing flow for efficient layout synthesis with a unique benefit to better evaluation of the PV-related post-layout effects. After finishing the sizing process, a hybrid OPC operation, which adopts global rule-based OPC and local model-based OPC along with the PV-band shifting, is performed as a post-processing step. Thereafter, a target mask layout is created with fast processing time, high wafer image fidelity, low mask complexity, and robust circuit performance under PV conditions. This present method provides an efficient solution to layout synthesis with respect to analog ICs by combining the deterministic sizing process with fast analog layout migration and hybrid OPC operations.