1. Purpose and scope
Tape-out releases the die to the foundry, and once masks are made, changes are expensive. The sign-off review is the last chance to catch a missing corner, an unexplained waiver or a result produced with an older kit version. In RF products tape-out has a second purpose that is easy to underestimate: measurement depends on hardware that must be designed now. Evaluation boards, fixtures, probe cards and the calibration and de-embedding standards that remove their effects take time to make, and if they are missing when wafers arrive, the first weeks of silicon are lost.
The stage therefore runs two streams in parallel. The first finishes the die: final checks on the merged database, the sign-off checklist and release to the foundry. The second prepares measurement: the characterisation plan, the evaluation board and fixture design with their own electromagnetic models, the de-embedding method and its standards, and the RF production test strategy. The stage ends at tape-out, when the database is accepted by the foundry and the evaluation hardware is designed and ordered.
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