Tim,
Re: "The link between design and manufacturing is captured by design rules."
Ahhh ... Now there's the "rub". When design and manufacturing are "tightly coupled",
the design rules will tend to be optimized for the particular application. Examples would
be the number of metal layers, thickness and pitch of metal layers, device
performance (Idsat versus Ioff), and many other "trade-offs". If you seperate
these, then manufacturing will "dictate" the rules and will not be as
aggressive. I think we are seeing some of this with the AMD/UMC "partnership".
Another example is HPQ ... They started their "outsourcing" with INTC
fab'ing their first part, then went to IBM for their second part, and HPQ is
now coming back to INTC. The reason HPQ has come back is the need for
a CPU type performance process.
Make It So,
Yousef
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