In one of my earlier posts (EDA Standards I'd Love To See) , I argued for a standard for interconnect extraction rule from that will be used by the extraction tool. I quote:
"There are only so many things one expects to be present in an RC Deck. These values, much like in DRC decks, are constant for a given process. It can't be hard to develop a common extraction rules format. Vendors can still add value via the speed and accuracy of their RC estimation algorithms."
TSMC has now developed a common RC extraction deck format called iRCX that can be used as the input for all RC extraction tools. The utopian promise: RC tools all support the same standard for rules and compete on accuracy and runtime. According the press release, this standard is the first of many to come (I' m expecting that DRC & LVS rule formats are next in line).
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Wednesday, June 03, 2009
EDA Standardization: The Next Wave Is Here!
Posted by Aditya Ramachandran at 3:05 PM 4 comments
Labels: EDA
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Reframe and Reuse: Extending The Capabilities Of EDA Tools Through Creative Reframing
There's a joke that goes like this (from Mike Cook's List Of Math Jokes) :
A physicist and a mathematician setting in a faculty lounge.My interpretation: Make the physicist do all the work!
Suddenly, the coffee machine catches on fire. The physicist grabs a
bucket and leaps towards the sink, fills the bucket with water and
puts out the fire. The second day, the same two sit in the same
lounge. Again, the coffee machine catches on fire. This time, the
mathematician stands up, gets a bucket, hands the bucket to the
physicist, thus reducing the problem to a previously solved one.
There any many problems is ASIC design for which straightforward solutions/tools may not exist. You want the tool to consider timing, area, power and X. The rub is that the tool does not support measuring or optimizing for X. In such cases, it is worthwhile to explore the possibility of reframing X into something the tool does understand.
By reframing the problem, you save yourself a whole lot of work:
- You don't code, test and release a tool that supports concurrent optimization of X, timing, area, power,..
- You don't create a tool that optimizes only X and spend time iterating between X optimization and standard optimization
- You get to leverage the powerful algorithms built into your EDA tool to concurrently optimize for timing, area, power, X, Y, Z, ...
Tags : ASIC, VLSI
Posted by Aditya Ramachandran at 5:51 PM 1 comments
Labels: Methodology
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