Virtuosity: Design, Plan, and Analysis - The 3 Sides Of A Coin, Episode 1

Hi, I'm Colin Thomson, Product Engineering Architect at Cadence Design Systems, Inc. My responsibilities include engaging with customers to offer them pathbreaking solutions for their Custom IC layout design challenges and to help them get the desired outcomes. Most recently, I have been helping customers create efficient advanced node layout designs using our novel Design Planning and Analysis tool, which coherently brings together all the 3 sides of a physical design process—Design, Plan, and Analysis. Through this series of blogs, I hope to share information that should help you adopt the Design Planning and Analysis tool for your designs. Stay tuned...

In ICADVM20.1, Virtuoso Layout Suite EXL, Design Planning and Analysis is the default floorplanning solution, which brings together Design Planning, Congestion Analysis, and Virtuoso Floorplanner under a consolidated Plan menu. This is the latest step in our journey to improve the implementation and integration of all our planning functionality. The Design Planning and Analysis tool can provide you maximum flexibility with planning and analyzing Analog/Mixed-Signal chips, IPs, and blocks, whether you are working at mature or advanced nodes.

How Does Design Planning and Analysis Simplify Things For A Layout Designer?

• The Design Planning and Analysis tool consolidates all design planning, congestion analysis, and floorplanning commands under the new Plan menu, giving you a single point of access to all the commands you need for your layout design.
• The consolidated Plan menu commands are logically organized to support various layout design flows.
• To offer ease of access, the layout editor Design Planning workspace is now enhanced to also provide access to the consolidated Plan menu and the new, consolidated Design Planning toolbar.

The new Plan menu and the enhanced Design Planning toolbar guide you through all the steps in the floorplanning process, putting the commands you need, at your fingertips.

• Generation

Using the full hierarchical generation capabilities of Design Planning and Analysis, you can effectively plan and enable the connectivity and constraint driven flows in Virtuoso Layout Suite.

• Placement Planning

With the Design Planning and Analysis tool, you have the ability to plan, visualize, and edit through the hierarchy—improving manual, assisted, and automatic placement. Making decisions based on the context of the full design means less expensive iterations, resulting in substantial productivity gains.

• Pin Planning

Not only does the Design Planning and Analysis tool give you the advantage of hierarchical pin planning and optimization, it also enables you to perform congestion-aware pin placement through the hierarchy.

• Global Route Planning and Congestion Analysis

The capability to run congestion analysis earlier in the design lifecycle allows you to visualize available routing resources in your floorplan, saving expensive iterations. Additionally, this can help you clear congested areas, leading to better convergence and reduced floorplan area.

So, that's all I wanted to talk about in this blog. Hope it gives you a good overview of what is possible with Design Planning and Analysis. I plan to share more information in my upcoming blogs, watch out for the next episode. 

Related Resources

For more information on Cadence circuit design products and services, visit www.cadence.com.

Contact Us

For any questions, general feedback, or even if you want to suggest a future blog topic, write to custom_ic_blogs@cadence.com.

Happy reading, and stay safe!

- Colin Thomson

 About Virtuosity

Virtuosity has been our most viewed and admired blog series for a long time. The series has brought to the fore some less well-known yet very useful software and documentation improvements and has also shed light on some exciting new offerings in Virtuoso technology. This series broadcasts the voices of different bloggers and experts, who continue to preserve the legacy of Virtuosity and try to give new dimensions to it by covering topics across the length and breadth of the Virtuoso environment, and a lot more. To receive notifications about the new blogs in this series, click Subscribe and submit your email ID in the Subscriptions box.