February 29, 2008 — Lars Liebmann, Distinguished Engineer, Design for Manufacturability, IBM, talks with Solid State Technology‘s Senior Technical Editor Debra Vogler about papers he presented at the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference (Feb. 25-29). He explains the misconceptions that persist regarding restricted design rules (RDRs), and addresses the need for designers to react to systematic and stable effects with broad, coarse, layout adjustments — not worry about minor movements based on a specific moment in time. He also discusses the DFM opportunity that awaits the industry at 22nm with “soft” and “hard” DFM, and how these concepts will be required to keep the scaling path profitable.