As the semiconductor industry strives to keep Moore’s Law moving forward, companies are continually confronted with new and mounting challenges. The use of fin field-effect transistors (finFETs) and the recent introduction of gate-allaround (GAA) finFETs present questions of performance, scalability, and variation resilience that have yet to be fully resolved. The need for multi-patterning, which has been in place since the 22 nm node, is not going away, even with the introduction of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. Complex fill requirements have emerged as a critical success factor in both manufacturability and performance in leading-edge nodes. These factors, among others, have created significant impacts across the electronic design automation (EDA) design-to-tapeout ecosystem, particularly in physical verification. In response, EDA suppliers constantly evaluate and experiment with the design information they receive from both design houses and foundries, and often establish collaborative projects, to assess the impact of changing technology, and to develop and implement new functionality and new tools that reduce or eliminate time and resource impacts while ensuring accuracy and full coverage. Replacing inefficient, less precise verification processes with smarter, more accurate, faster, and more efficient functionality helps maintain, and even grow, both the bottom line and product quality in the face of increasing technological complexity.
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