AUTOMATION OF RTL TO GDS II DESIGN FLOW USING SCRIPT’S METHODOLOGY

Abstract

As technology is advancing from submicron technologies to nano-meter technologies, design complexities and challenges also increased proportionally. As a result, engineers have lot of things to concentrate and the design needs a lot of attention so that it can be closed in the expected time. Also engineer needs to well take care of the things like firing the Runs, choosing correct inputs, creating command files, custom reporting, and the other routine things. And, the project implementation team should ensure that the project specifications like corners derates, HVT Cells, Metal Scheme etc., are well maintained in all blocks at all levels. All these things have given rise to the deployment of a robust automated system called RTG Flow. RTG is acronym for RTL 2 GDS which has a very robust automation that helps in the smooth flow of implementation of Library qualification, physical design flows and verification flows i.e. from the Synthesis to Tape-Out. Basically, RTG Flow involves running lot of scripts and wrappers to do a specific task like Firing the runs, controlling them in both sequential and parallel manner, parsing the reports, comparing the runs, displaying them in web etc., In simple, it can do most of the tasks where the human intervention is not needed. It has been developed with the scripting languages like Make, Shell, Perl, Tcl-TK, Python. The thesis is an effort of automation efforts involved in design of an ASIC.