An Engineering Change Orders Design Method Based on Patchwork-Like Partitioning for High Performance LSIs

Yuichi NAKAMURA
Ko YOSHIKAWA
Takeshi YOSHIMURA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E88-A    No.12    pp.3351-3357
Publication Date: 2005/12/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 10.1093/ietfec/e88-a.12.3351
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on VLSI Design and CAD Algorithms)
Category: Logic Synthesis
Keyword: 
logic design,  engineering change orders,  partitioning,  

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Summary: 
This paper describes a novel engineering change order (ECO) design method for large-scale, high performance LSIs, based on a patchwork-like partitioning technique. In conventional design methods, even when only small changes are made to the design after the placement and routing process, a whole re-layout must be done, and this is very time consuming. Using the proposed method, we can partition the design into several parts after logic synthesis. When design changes occur in HDL, only the parts related to the changes need to be redesigned. The netlist for the changed design remains almost the same as the original, except for the small changed parts. For partitioning, we used multiple-fan-out-points as partition borders. An experimental evaluation of our method showed that when a small change was made in the RTL description, the revised circuit part had only about 87 gates on average. This greatly reduces the re-layout time required for implementing an ECO. In actual commercial designs in which several design changes are required, it takes only one day to redesign.


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