The present invention provides a layout yield improvement tool that
performs wire spreading to optimize integrated circuit (IC) designs in
the physical design stage after detail routing. Preferably, the wire
spreading is performed on a geotopological layout. Each modifiable wire
thereof is processed to generate a geometric bottom-up shape (BUS) and a
top-down shape (TDS). The BUS and TDS are merged to form a final
geometrical Middle Shape (MS). Each point in the MS has a position is
averaged from the positions of the two correlated points in the BUS and
TDS. Unnecessary short jogs are removed from the MS of each wire. A final
layout is generated by combining all of the final geometric shapes of
each wire segments. As such, the wire-to-wire spacing is increased to
more than the minimum spacing requirement without causing any design rule
violations.