dhellman, CPUs are designed on suites of software tools, like an architect drawing a house. The architect tries to make sure he has no errors, no beams in the middle of the living room, is there enough of the right size pipe to operate the third floor bathrooms and swimming pools etc etc, and so they use these design suites to plan and lay out the entire CPU. Like the architect, they have many things to check, shorts, power, as Ali says it is a sea of details that go beyond the ability of a human to encompass, they just apply a number of design rules along with experienced engineers and at the end of the day out comes the layour data for all the masks for each level. These are virtual masks and then then go to a mask maker. These masks are made for .13 and use the latest in short wavelength interference mode design. Then they use this mask set to make 'first silicon', sometims it works and sometimes it does not, so they find out what is right/wrong and then change the masks to correct this and they keep going through this cycle until they get it right or throw it away and start over.
Here are a few links to read about it.
The first one is a PhD thesis and is a sea of details that will take you a while to go through, but it is worth the time as it gives a good education. It is ca 1997, so a bit out of date, but the principals used now are similar, at smaller feature sizes with extreme ultraviolet or xray tools etc.
iue.tuwien.ac.at
These other links are assorted stuff that is pertinent. there are enough links on them to keep you going for a week or two
cymer.com
matec.org
e-insite.net
micromagazine.com
Bill |
