Method for checking a integrated circuit for electrostatic discharge bobustness
AssigneeKoninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.
InventorsWolfgang Kemper, Zeljko Mrcarica, Thomas Keller, Daniel Thommen, Joachim Reiner
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Abstract
The invention is a method and a computer program product for checking an integrated circuit for electrostatic discharge (ESD) robustness at the design level and comprises essentially the check of the layout of the integrated circuit against a set of rules defining one or more transistor geometric and/or electrical and/or material values and generating an output or report of this check. This method can check automatically a complete IC design layout at any design level. An exemplary design is an ESD protection layout, a design block or a complete IC design.
Claims21
A method for checking an integrated circuit for electrostatic discharge robustness, comprising:
- (a) identifying a pad in the layout of said integrated circuit,
- (b) identifying for said pad any diffusions connected to said pad,
- (c) checking for each said diffusion whether a minimum spacing between said diffusion and a neighboring diffusion is fulfilled,
- (d) generating an output if the result of said checking indicates the minimum spacing between said diffusion and the neighboring diffusion is not fulfilled, and
- (e) repeating the steps (c) and (d) for other identified diffusions.
A computer program product stored on a computer usable-medium, comprising
- computer readable program means for causing a computer to identify a pad in the layout of said integrated circuit,
- computer readable program means for causing the computer to identify for said pad any diffusions connected to said pad,
- computer readable program means for causing the computer to check for said diffusion whether a minimum spacing between said diffusion and a neighboring diffusion is fulfilled,
- computer readable program means for causing the computer to generate an output or report, if the result of said checking indicates the minimum spacing between said diffusion and the neighboring diffusion is not fulfilled, and
- computer readable program means for causing the computer to check for other identified diffusions whether said minimum spacing is fulfilled and to generate an output or report, if the result of said indicates the minimum spacing between said diffusion and the neighboring diffusion is not fulfilled.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.