2.4 Process Optimization

Semiconductor fabrication processes need to be qualified based on the properties of the resulting devices which are operating under pre-defined conditions such as clock frequency, supply voltage, or temperature. Several metrics characterize those devices in terms of speed, power consumption, sensitivity against statistical variations during fabrication, linearity, or reliability. Depending on the design goals, these measures have to be combined using specific weights in order to obtain an overall measure of quality as depicted in Figure 2.7.