June 3, 2004 – A new group has been formed to create open standards for unifying IC design and manufacturing information, in order to counter increasing costs and complexities associated with design for manufacturability (DFM).

The Design-to-Manufacturing Coalition’s (DTMC) initial focus will be on lithography issues: how to speed photomask and wafer manufacturing ramps and improve yields through the communication of more detailed and comprehensive design, mask, and wafer process information. Charter members include Applied Materials, Cadence Design Systems, DuPont Photomasks, Freescale Semiconductor Inc., LSI Logic, Photronics, and Sagantec.

“The intrinsic couplings permeating sub-90nm processes have created an economic imperative for the semiconductor industry to shift to the ‘system view,’ because isolated flows for design and manufacturing are growing more inefficient,” said Steve Schulz, president and CEO of Silicon Integration Initiative, the nonprofit organization which formed the DTMC. “This [is] an industry problem that can only be solved through broad cross-industry collaboration [resulting in] new standard interfaces, models, and semantics that permit streamlined data integration.”