In spite of "doomsday" expectations, Moore's Law is alive and well. Semiconductor manufacturing and design companies, as well as the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry have been pushing ahead to bring more functionality to satisfy more aggressive space/power/performance requirements. Physical verification occupies a unique space in the ecosystem as one of the key bridges between design and manufacturing. As such, the traditional space of design rule checking (DRC) and layout versus schematic (LVS) have expanded into electrical verification and yield enabling technologies such as optical proximity correction, critical area analysis, multi-patterning decomposition and automated filling. To achieve the expected accuracy and performance demanded by the design and manufacturing community, it is necessary to consider the physical effects of the manufacturing processes and electronic devices and to use the most advanced software engineering technology and computational capabilities.

In spite of "doomsday" expectations, Moore's Law is alive and well. Semiconductor manufacturing and design companies, as well as the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry have been pushing ahead to bring more functionality to satisfy more aggressive space/power/performance requirements.

The continuation of Moore's law by conventional CMOS scaling is becoming challenging. 3D Packaging with 3D through silicon vias (TSV) interconnects is showing promise for extending scaling using mature silicon technology, providing another path towards the "More than Moore". Two years ago, the big unceasing question was "Why 3D?" Today, as we move forward with the concrete implementation of the technology, the questions are now "When 3D?" and "How 3D?" There are quite a few brave souls who have taken this disruptive interconnect technology and are investing in it today to gain benefit from it. However, for many the lingering questions remain "Are we there yet?" "Is it now or the future?"

Although innovations in manufacturing technology help in reducing variations, IC design variations are a fact of life. In addition to random variations, systematic stress induced variations are becoming increasingly important. This panel will bring the diverse views from academia, foundries, fabless and IDM communities to address various topics on next generation solutions for variability, with the main emphasis on design and architecture solutions. Specifically, this panel will discuss:• Would new architectures mitigate variability in 22nm and beyond?• Could design regularity effectively mitigate variability?• What design techniques can be used to minimize variability 'on-the-fly'?• What new techniques can be used for memories, register arrays and flip-flops?

Yesterday's cell phones have rapidly evolved into versatile multi-media computers heavily loaded with a wide spectrum of technologies to support many functions and use modes. Designing and verifying such complex devices becomes increasingly challenging due to the need to: incorporate larger number of functions and diverse use modes, increased bandwidth, provide support for multimedia devices with high resolution, offer new methods for user interactions, and all of this at a fixed power budget and with high reliability. In addition, teams need to keep up with the convergence of wireless radio algorithms and be able to support more functionality moving into the software layer.

DFM has taken shape by virtue of manufacturers defining a series of "DFM activities", related to parametric and stochastic yield analysis and recommendations for design changes to improve yield. The picture is made more complex because the view from integrated device manufacturers, pure play foundries, and fabless semiconductor companies is not necessarily the same as they have different needs and constrains. This panel brings together DFM practitioners from each of these communities to discuss real experiences on the adoption level achieved so far as well as the impact in the manufactured products. The panel should be of interest of designers moving to advanced nodes (to learn from the experience of those that have "done it already") as well as those in the leading edge (such that they can compare experiences).