Pre-check Engine for Systemic DRC Violation Detection
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Modern chip designs face challenges in efficiently verifying physical layouts due to the large number of Design Rule Checking (DRC) violations, especially in early design phases, which leads to long runtimes, immense debugging efforts, and inability to detect root causes of systemic design issues.
Innovation Solution
A pre-DRC detection system, known as the pre-check engine, identifies systemic design violations before a full DRC process, using logic configured with design rules and configuration data to detect and report underlying causes of repeated violations, such as standard cell misplacement and border well tap cell placement issues, allowing for filtering and annotation of DRC results.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a full DRC process is performed on early-stage IC designs, then all design rule violations are detected, but the runtime becomes excessively long and debugging effort increases immensely
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the DRC process into two distinct phases: a pre-check phase that performs lightweight systematic violation detection, and a subsequent full DRC phase. The pre-check engine divides the design into components and identifies recurring violation patterns early, allowing designers to fix root causes before committing extensive computational resources to full DRC, thereby reducing overall runtime while maintaining detection completeness.
Solution Approach 2:
The pre-check engine performs preliminary detection of systemic design violations before the full DRC process. By identifying and reporting recurring violation patterns in advance, it enables designers to correct underlying issues early in the design flow, preventing the generation of massive numbers of individual violation reports that would otherwise require extensive debugging time.
2Loss of information
If conventional DRC tools are used on dirty designs, then individual violations are reported, but the ability to detect root causes of systemic issues is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The pre-check engine implements feedback by analyzing DRC violation patterns and identifying recurring systemic issues. It provides designers with information about root causes rather than just individual violation instances, creating a feedback loop that guides designers to fix underlying problems systematically. This reduces debugging complexity by directing attention to the source of multiple violations rather than treating each violation independently.
Solution Approach 2:
The pre-check engine acts as an intermediary between the raw DRC violation data and the designer. It processes the extensive list of individual violations, identifies recurring patterns, and presents synthesized information about systemic issues and root causes. This intermediary layer transforms overwhelming raw data into actionable insights, reducing the complexity of debugging while preserving complete violation detection capability.
Data Source
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
AI summary
Systems and methods support pre-DRC detection of systemic design violations. A method includes accessing an integrated circuit (IC) design (602), accessing a rule set for a circuit manufacturing process (604), and accessing a pre-check configuration file (606). The pre-check configuration file comprises configuration data to detect a systemic design violation in the IC design, and a systemic design violation comprise a violation of the rule deck of that occurs multiple times in the IC design and is attributable to a same underlying cause. The method further comprises detecting instances of the systemic design violation in the IC design (608).