This paper presents an x-ray machining system for the fabrication of three-dimensional microstructures with free-form surfaces. The structures with different sizes and various shapes can be generated by a single mask combining with precise moving paths. By adjusting the motions such as path types, overlaps and velocities, various 3D microstructures with complex features can be fabricated. The idea and the construction of this system, fabrication details and successful preliminary experimental results are introduced in this paper.

-Advanced process technologies impose more significant challenges especially when manufactured circuits exhibit substantial process variations. Consideration of process variations becomes critical to ensure high parametric timing yield. During the design stage, fast estimation of the achievable buffered delay can navigate more accurate and efficient wire planning and timing analysis in floorplanning or global routing. In this paper, we derive approximated first-order canonical forms for buffered delay estimation which considers the effect of process variations and the presence of buffer blockages. We empirically show that an existing deterministic delay estimation method will be over-pessimistic and thus result in unnecessary design rollback. The experimental results also show that our method can estimate buffered delay with 4% average error but achieve up to 149 times speedup when compared to a state-of-the-art statistical buffer insertion method.