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.
(more…)