The Calibre® RealTime Digital interface enables on-demand immediate Calibre signoff design rule checking (DRC) for digital design flows, enabling physical design and verification engineers to shave weeks off their tapeout schedule. Providing significant productivity advantages for “last mile” manual DRC closure, the Calibre RealTime Digital interface enables digital designers to optimize their manual DRC fixes and focus on meeting their power, performance and area (PPA) goals.
IC Design
Calibre RealTime Digital
Calibre RealTime Digital In-Depth
The Calibre RealTime Digital interface, with its ability to perform all checks in Calibre DRC, including recommended rules, pattern matching, equation-based DRC, and multi-patterning, lets digital designers verify manual DRC fixes, using the same foundry-qualified rule decks used by batch Calibre.
Imagine—no more time-intensive DRC closure iterations, and no more unwelcome, costly manufacturing issues after tapeout. In addition, the immediate DRC feedback provided by the Calibre RealTime Digital interface not only enables a correct-by-construction design approach, but also enables digital designers to perform a what-if analysis during DRC closure to optimize their DRC fixes, and consequently, the quality of their design. In short, the Calibre RealTime Digital interface lets the designers drive DRC closure, not their tools. And because it's Calibre, the results can be trusted.
How does it work? The Calibre RealTime Digital interface provides a tight integration between the Calibre physical verification platform and the digital implementation system. When invoked from the design tool, the Calibre RealTime Digital interface provides direct calls to Calibre analysis engines running foundry-qualified Calibre rule decks. Now, no matter the number and complexity of DRC checks, digital design and verification groups working at all nodes can get to DRC-clean quickly and with Calibre confidence.
Features and Benefits
Features
Immediate on-demand Calibre nmDRC verification in P&R Calibre Recon functionality for controlled DRC checking on designs in progress Uses standard foundry-qualified rule decks Ability to run all checks or configure custom check-recipes Provides built-in error review toolbar and Calibre RealTime-RVE results viewing to enhance ease of use Supports LEF and GDSII/OASIS views for cells, IP, and memory blocks Employs in-memory checking to ensure best performance Supports user-defined custom filters tied to layout interface Complements existing built-in native P&R tool checkers
Interactive Editing/Verification
Interactive editing and verification in the digital design environment ensures DRC closure in the shortest time possible.
Immediate Feedback
The Calibre RealTime Digital interface provides immediate feedback on DRC violations during manual DRC fixes, enabling quick and accurate correction of the most complex configurations.
Calibre Recon DRC
For designs still in progress, Calibre Recon DRC functionality lets designers find and fix specific classes of errors for those areas in which initial design and layout is complete, saving both time and resources by enabling designers to quickly debug these dirty design sections before a full-chip batch mode DRC run. Histograms, an SoC “heat map,” filtering/sorting capabilities, and other features make it easy to quickly identify root cause and debug errors. In addition, Calibre Recon functionality delivers all these capabilities using any foundry-qualified Calibre rule deck “as is” on any technology node.
Shorter Tapeout Cycle
The Calibre RealTime Digital interface reduces overall tapeout time by eliminating multiple expensive and time-consuming verification iterations.
Design Optimization
With improved productivity during DRC closure, digital designers have more time to focus on meeting or exceeding PPA goals.
Improved Productivity When Exploring New Technology Nodes
Immediate Calibre signoff DRC feedback allows digital designers to quickly explore and become familiar with DRC rules in new technology nodes. No more tedious design rule interpretations, and no waiting around for verification runs to complete.
One Tool, One Interface
The Calibre RealTime Digital interface runs within the digital design tool, and with the built-in toolbar, Calibre invocation and results debug are just a click away.
Calibre Confidence
Because the Calibre RealTime Digital interface uses Calibre analysis engines and foundry-qualified rule decks, designers can have full confidence in the results.
Fix DFM hotspots in P&R with Calibre sign-off confidence
Manually fixing DFM hotspots outside of the P&R process is time-consuming and iterative. Adding the Calibre RealTime Digital interface to the GLOBALFOUNDRIES DFM-POP in-design hotspot detection and correction flow lets designers find and fix known hotspots during P&R with Calibre sign-off confidence, providing fast design optimization that can reduce tapeout time.
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