Introduction

Design for manufacturability and statistical design encompass a number of activities and areas of study spanning the integrated circuit design and manufacturing worlds. In the early days of the planar integrated circuit, it was typical for a handful of practitioners working on a particular design to have a fairly complete understanding of the manufacturing process, the resulting semiconductor active and passive devices, as well as the resulting circuit - often composed of as few as tens of devices. With the success of semiconductor scaling, predicted and - to a certain extent even driven - by Moore’s law, and the vastly increased complexity of modern nano-meter scale processes and the billion-device circuits they allow, there came a necessary separation between the various disciplines.