What does PG stand for?

When someone speaks of Physical layout, Routing, Verification and PG.
What does the PG stand for?

 

Pattern generation.

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Is Pattern Generation the same as Adding Fill shapes to meet Density
requirements?

 

It standards for pattern generation, the process of creating a pattern
of rectangles that together made an image of the layer.

The original technique used to create the reticule image involved a
device with an adjustable rectangular aperture that could be rotated in
fixed increments. Once it was adjusted and positioned, a shutter would
open and close to allow light to expose the photographic plate of the
reticule. Enough rectangles and you have an image of the layer. This was
then developed and a put into a step and repeat machine to create the
actual mask used in the fab.

The PG software would break the shapes into rectangles of the available
sizes and rotations, then sequence them for minimum time. The X and Y
rate of motion, as well as the time to adjust the aperture was taken
into account. One of the problems was preventing too much overlap of
rectangles along the edges of the polygon, which could cause the image
too bloom from excess exposure.

These days we use raster scan techniques to directly write to the
reticule. No blooming, no oddities along edges at non-standard angles,
and much faster for very complex layers.

 

Salut Roland,

there are 3 possible interpretations in general
1- in testability, Automatic Test Pattern Generation, create the vectors
to be used in a tester.
2- tapeout, stream to gds2 or LAFF format. That is in my experience TI
parlance to use "PG" rather than "tapeout".
3- "fill pattern generation", "tile pattern generation", could mean what
you mentioned.

In your case, that is most likely 2)