Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and Applied Materials, Inc. announced the companies are collaborating on a development program to optimize the chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP) process through silicon characterization and modeling for advanced-node designs at 14 nanometer (nm) and below. The program allows design teams to predict the impact of CMP on both functional yield and parametric yield, and for manufacturing teams to boost planarization performance, which is increasingly critical fo...