Archive for June, 2016
Saturday, June 18th, 2016
On-line Design Rule Checking (DRC) is nothing new. The technology has been in use for years in a variety of different layout editors and yet nearly every layout engineer has a love/hate relationship with it. Why? Well it really comes down to the use model and the responsiveness of the application.
At the beginning of the design process, layout engineers love on-line DRC. But as the design progresses, the relationship begins to sour. The problem is that as the layout gets bigger and more complex, the performance invariably starts to fall off until it reaches a point where it becomes unacceptable and the layout engineer simply turns it off and resorts to running the occasional batch checks.
To really be effective, on-line DRC has to be an interactive tool that is run often during the layout process, so, as such it needs to have a simple use model and have a fast response. The engine needs to be ‘built-in’ to deliver the required performance and the feedback needs to be comprehensive enough to enable the layout engineer to quickly fix the violation.
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Tags: Custom Compiler, custom IC design, custom layout, design rule checking, DRC, EDA, FinFET, In-Design Assistant, Synopsys, violation, visually-assisted automation
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Wednesday, June 15th, 2016
To all of you who attended DAC last week in Austin, TX–welcome back! I hope you were among the 175+ people who attended the Custom Compiler lunch event on Tuesday, June 7 to hear directly from engineers at GSI Technology, Samsung, STMicroelectronics and Synopsys’ IP group who described how Custom Compiler’s visually-assisted automation improves their productivity for both FinFET and established-node designs. We’ll be posting a videolog of the presentations on the Synopsys web site soon for those who missed the live event.
In the last blog I detailed the Symbolic Editor Layout Assistant and showed how the layout engineer can make simple graphical choices of how the layout needs to look and then have the placement taken care of by a placement engine. In this post I will outline another layout assistant: the Routing Assistant. The routing task is one that absolutely screams out for an automated approach, however past efforts have required a great deal of text-based constraints to get anything near to what you really want.
Custom Compiler’s Routing Assistant is a perfect combination of user guidance and automation. It’s a visually-assisted approach that allows the layout engineer to simply click on the starting point of the route and then drag the cursor in the direction they want the routing to follow. As the cursor moves along, behind the scenes the routing engine searches for connections that it can make. When it finds a connection it automatically taps to the pin without the layout engineer having to enter a mouse click. The user simply guides the router with the mouse and it fills in the routing details automatically.
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Tags: custom IC design, DAC, EDA, FinFET, layout productivity, routing, routing assistant, symbolic editor, Synopsys
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Wednesday, June 1st, 2016
As mentioned previously, on March 30th Silicon Valley was buzzing with excitement. Synopsys revealed Custom Compiler, a fresh approach to custom design that employs visually-assisted automation technologies to speed up common design tasks, reduce iterations and enable reuse at the SNUG Silicon Valley event. During this event, the R&D folks did a walkthrough of the technology ‘under-the-hood’ and showed the audience some cool layout assistants that leverage the graphical use model familiar to layout designers while eliminating the need to write complicated code and constraints. [Click here to view the videolog of the SNUG event.]
One of the layout assistants that was shown was the symbolic editor. This really is a must-have assistant when it comes to placing devices that need to be in a specific interdigitated pattern, like a differential pair. In the schematic, it is two symbols, but in the layout it could be hundreds of devices. The symbolic editor allows device placement to be edited in an easy and graphical manner and comes with a rich collection of predefined placement patterns. If you find a placement pattern you like, you can simply use it as-is and the symbolic editor will generate a correct-by-construction placement that you can instantiate in your layout. If you don’t find an exact match, you can easily use a pattern that is similar to what you need and rearrange the placement pattern graphically. No constraints to enter, no code to write and layout is done in minutes vs. hours.
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Tags: constraints, Custom Compiler, custom IC design, differential pair, FinFET, interdigitated pattern, layout, SNUG, symbolic editor, Synopsys, visually-assisted automation
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