Impact of reticle imperfections on integrated circuit processing

Recently, I’ve been involved in our program in AMD to come up with design rules for the next generation of bipolar products. For those of you who have never been involved with coming up with new design rules, what it consists of is everyone who is responsible for a process and technology, getting together and blaming the other guy for not being able to do as well as we’d like. And what I’d like to do today is talk about how we can, through improvement in the quality of reticle, take some of the burden off the lithographer.