Four ways to build a CAD flow: In-house design to custom-EDA tool
By Daniel Hoggar, Verific Design Automation
EDN (June 9, 2022)
An internal computer aided design (CAD) or design services engineer is responsible for delivering efficient, robust and high-quality design flow solutions. The design flow on a day-to-day basis keeps chip designers and verification engineers productive and focused on their jobs, preventing them from debugging CAD tools and flows and creating ad hoc and undocumented scripts. Over the life of a project, a high-quality design flow differentiates a company from competitors and can be the difference between getting chips to market first or being the victim of unexpected process bottleneck and delays.
And yet, every semiconductor project group deals with inefficiencies that constrain them from delivering ideal solutions and limits productivity. Today’s CAD engineers use a patchwork of tools, flows and scripts consisting of commercial electronic design automation (EDA) products, commercial or in-house customized add-ons and in-house intellectual property (IP), a problem for many project groups because of:
- Tool flow gaps in existing EDA products
- The burden of maintaining in-house or homegrown tools, flows and scripts
- The lack of time to build and test high-quality, robust internal tools
That inevitably leads to a bunch of problems, as explained in the following sections.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- USB 4.0 V2 PHY - 4TX/2RX, TSMC N3P , North/South Poly Orientation
- FH-OFDM Modem
- NFC wireless interface supporting ISO14443 A and B with EEPROM on SMIC 180nm
- PQC CRYSTALS core for accelerating NIST FIPS 202 FIPS 203 and FIPS 204
- UCIe Controller baseline for Streaming Protocols for ASIL B Compliant, AEC-Q100 Grade 2
Related White Papers
- A Heuristic Approach to Fix Design Rule Check (DRC) Violations in ASIC Designs @7nm FinFET Technology
- Vital Ways to Prevent a Cyberattack
- It's Just a Jump to the Left, Right? Shift Left in IC Design Enablement
- BCD Technology: A Unified Approach to Analog, Digital, and Power Design
Latest White Papers
- FastPath: A Hybrid Approach for Efficient Hardware Security Verification
- Automotive IP-Cores: Evolution and Future Perspectives
- TROJAN-GUARD: Hardware Trojans Detection Using GNN in RTL Designs
- How a Standardized Approach Can Accelerate Development of Safety and Security in Automotive Imaging Systems
- SV-LLM: An Agentic Approach for SoC Security Verification using Large Language Models