AN IMPROVED RULE-BASED DUMMY METAL FILL METHOD FOR 65 NM ASIC DESIGN

Chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) is an essential process in deep-submicrometer LSI manufacturing to achieve Chip's planarization. It includes two processes: back-end-of-line (BEOL) and front-end-of-line (FEOL). This paper focuses on the problem of BEOL in 65 nm copper process. Although model-based dummy metal fill has become a tendency recently, the proposed improved rule-based dummy fill is appropriate still. A middle scale design is used for simulation. The metal density, oxide thickness, copper thickness, capacitance variation and variation of layout data size were investigated. The results show that improved rule-based dummy fill and model-based dummy fill have the same planarization, and proposed method has small capacitance variation. The GDS file size of the proposed rule-based fill is less than the model-based fill's.