Pegasus: Get Your Wings: Virtuoso/Pegasus In-Design Signoff

26 Mar 2021 • 2 minute read

The beauty of Pegasus is that it doesn’t only work excellently in standalone mode but also seamlessly integrates with other tools such as the industry-standard Virtuoso custom/analog platform and enables users to complete advanced-node DRC in hours.

The layout engineers need fast DRC to verify that their design is correct. This is where the Virtuoso/Pegasus integrated system comes in. It bridges the gap and improves productivity between the custom implementation and physical verification tools, such as Pegasus Interactive DRC, Pegasus Interactive SignOff Fill and Pegasus Interactive Density Analysis.

Brief Introduction of Pegasus Interactive Tools

Pegasus Interactive DRC

Pegasus Interactive DRC tool captures and validates design intent and ensures design convergence by performing in-design interactive DRC checks on the layout immediately after editing the layout. Pegasus Interactive gives you flexibility to select the error browser as per your convenience. It supports two types of browsers: one is the Pegasus Results Viewer and second is Virtuoso native supported Annotation Browser.

Pegasus Interactive SignOff Fill

Pegasus Interactive SignOff Fill allows you to generate dummy fills using foundry fill decks and automatically map the generated dummy fills to the Virtuoso OA database. In the Pegasus Interactive SignOff Fill flow, you can:

Create blockages to avoid dummy fills generation under blockages.
Generate fills in a specific area and then add more fills incrementally in another area
Generate fill shapes in a user specified area based on specified symmetry value.

Pegasus Interactive Density Analysis

Pegasus Interactive Density Analysis generates density results for the required layers. Results are shown in the layout viewer as a density heatmap and in Pegasus Results Viewer as a histogram.

You can run the density analysis on active layers, visible layers or custom layers. You can also merge multiple layers and view the combined result under one tab only.

Let us see a comparison between Pegasus/Virtuoso versus Virtuoso/third party tool

With Pegasus Interactive, you can do true realtime/dynamic DRC on live data analysis as opposed to after the fact DRC checking on third-party tool. This saves multiple iterations of running DRC and fixing errors outside Virtuoso. The in-memory DRC in Virtuoso makes the whole process very fast and reduces the layout turnaround time drastically.

Pegasus Interactive is tested with every release of Virtuoso versus other tools are tested after Virtuoso is released. This cannot be ensured while using a third-party tool and will cause lags.

In my opinion, a good collaboration is one that brings out the best of each other. This is exactly what the Pegasus/Virtuoso collaboration does.

To get detailed information on how these two tools work together, see:

Pegasus Interactive RAK

Pegasus Interactive SignOff Fill RAK

Pegasus Interactive Video