“How Do You Eat an Elephant?”

 “There is only one way to eat an elephant, a bite at a time,” is a quote often attributed to the late Desmond Tutu.

The underlying message is that when faced with a big challenge, the best way to tackle it is to break the big challenge into smaller pieces. Sometimes, the smaller tasks can be accomplished in parallel, which will help you complete the enormous task on time or even ahead of schedule.

Can you think of a recent experience where breaking a large project into smaller tasks helped you meet your deadline?

A hierarchical or modular approach is required when implementing a chip consisting of billions of transistors in physical design. The large (elephantine) design is broken into smaller (bite-sized) blocks. The blocks are abstracted when the top level is implemented. Simultaneously, the blocks are implemented in parallel and independent of each other.

If you want to learn more about hierarchical implementation, I suggest registering for the Innovus Hierarchical Implementation course.

After completing this online course, you will be able to:

• Floorplan and create partitions for your design
• Run pin placement and route busses
• Create and use ILMs
• Prototype a design using blackboxes, FlexModels, and SoC Architecture Information technology
• Run the Integrated Hierarchical Database (iHDB) flow for implementation

This course and all other online courses are included with your access to http://support.cadence.com  at no additional cost.

Once you complete the course, you can take the badge exam. When you pass the exam, you will be awarded a badge by Credly, which you can display on social media. The badges are also free with your access to support.cadence.com.

Pin placement and routing buses are essential to hierarchical implementation, and this video, How to Plan Bus Routing with Bus Guides, demonstrates how to place pins, plan, and route buses.

We hope you find the course and related videos helpful in tackling implementation challenges for large designs where flat implementation would be impractical.

(As an aside, the thumbnail image on this post was created by the free generative AI tool DALL-E.)

Happy Learning!