Provably good and practically efficient algorithms for CMP dummy fill

• Published in: Proceedings of the 46th Annual Design Automation Conference pp. 539 - 544
• Main Authors: Feng, Chunyang, Zhou, Hai, Yan, Changhao, Tao, Jun, Zeng, Xuan
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 26.07.2009
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied computing > Physical sciences and engineering > Engineering; design for manufacturability; dummy fill problem; covering linear programming
• ISBN: 9781605584973; 1605584975
• DOI: 10.1145/1629911.1630052

To reduce chip-scale topography variation in Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) process, dummy fill is widely used to improve the layout density uniformity. Previous researches formulated the dummy fill problem as a standard Linear Program (LP). However, solving the huge linear program formed by real-life designs is very expensive and has become the hurdle in deploying the technology. Even though there exist efficient heuristics, their performance cannot be guaranteed. In this paper, we develop a dummy fill algorithm that is both efficient and with provably good performance. It is based on a fully polynomial time approximation scheme by Fleischer [4] for covering LP problems. Furthermore, based on the approximation algorithm, we also propose a new greedy iterative algorithm to achieve high quality solutions more efficiently than previous Monte-Carlo based heuristic methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms.