Beyond The Text : Adding Presentations To The Tao

A good presentation can convey a lot more than the dry text of a blog could. I'm hoping that, in some future posts, I could supplement the text of the blog with some good presentation material. I'm posting (via SlideShare) one my my SNUG presentations to start things off...

Dynamic Shift Frequency Scaling Of ATPG Patterns

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: snug)

Tags : ASIC, VLSI

Safety in Numbers : In Search of A Complete Statistical RTL2GDSII Flow

Much has been said about the shift from corner-based sign-off to statistical sign-off. Most of the material has been focusing on the use of statistical timing analysis and statistical extraction to alleviate the pessimism and effort associated with corner-based sign-off. What no one has been touting is a complete statistical solution. Design in the statistical domain is a paradigm shift and cannot but help affect the entire RTL2GDSII flow. In the absence of a complete solution, there's a "lost in translation" scenario when a design transitions from corner-based implementation into statistical sign-off. Put bluntly, is there sense in adopting statistical sign-off while the rest of the flow supports only corner-based analysis?

The smart money says that statistical design is here to stay. In that case, the complete solution is already on its way. But, right now, we are in a no-man's land between corner-based design and statistical design. What are our choices?

1. Short-term Gain/ Long-term Pain. Use corner-based flows until a complete statistical solution is in place. Nothing needs to change as of now. Of course, the transition will be widespread and painful when it is attempted.
   
2. Short-term Pain/ Long-term Gain. Adapt non-statistical implementations tools to work with existing stat-aware tools. The transition into a complete solution will be gradual. The pain here is that of adapting non-statistical tools to fit into a statistical design flow. Lots of workarounds, custom scripts that will eventually be rendered obsolete by the arrival of eda tools with native stat support.
   

Tags : ASIC, VLSI