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Getting to tapeout faster… and easier!

By Design With Calibre

By Sherif Hany – Mentor, A Siemens Business

Complex reliability checks blowing your verification schedule? Learn how Calibre PERC smart one-time metadata generation can slash your runtimes and resource utilization…

Athletes, no matter where they come from or what sport they play, typically use many of the same training activities. For example, one popular exercise requires athletes to sprint from one point to another, then back to the starting line, repeating the runs until a coach decides they’ve had enough.

Getting a design to tapeout can feel like an endless series of breathless sprints back and forth, as designers modify and optimize a design before tapeout. Each change must be re-verified to ensure the design meets all the design goals while remaining in compliance with signoff requirements. Adding to the challenge, it’s not just the designers’ efforts that must be repeated. In each validation flow, design metadata is repeatedly generated, even when that input design data is unchanged. This redundant data production creates unnecessary runtime and resource overhead, reducing productivity, increasing costs, and extending tapeout schedules. Not exactly a winning combination, eh?

Fortunately for designers, there’s now a better, more efficient way, at least for the most critical and/or time-consuming stages of the validation flow. The Calibre™ PERC™ platform leverages an innovative approach that allows designers to generate design metadata one time during the initial verification flow. When checks are re-run, that metadata is pragmatically reused to skip steps in which the data is untouched, improving both designer productivity and turnaround time. This smart one-time metadata generation can not only be used in verification flows, such as voltage-aware design rule checking or point to point and current density verification, but also in DFM applications, design profiling, and failure analysis.

Breathless with excitement (or exhaustion)? Want to know the details? Download a copy of our white paper, Increase productivity by reusing metadata for signoff & ECOs, and be on your way to a better, faster path to signoff. It’s a win-win!

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/calibre/2020/01/06/getting-to-tapeout-faster-and-easier/