Configure Physical Hierarchy and Virtuoso Floorplanner

Hello,

My name Alex Soyer and I'm the Product Enginneer in charge of the Virtuoso Floorplanner.

I will be more than happy to demo you the Floorplanner and to help you to test it on your own data.

• Does anyone use these tolls on a regular basis for production work? 

We have already customers using the Virtuoso Floorplanner in production IC613 and IC614.

• Is the Floorplanner capable of doing large designs? 

Some of teh customers have large designs.

We have fixed some preformances issues and we are still working on improving teh usability for large designs in current releases.

• Has Encounter completely replaced the Virtuoso floorplanning tools?

Our focus is really different.

The Virtuoso Floorplanner is a custom Floorplanner with Mixed Signal capabilities and schematic driven but not timing driven. We provide a very flexible interface and you can take advantage of all other Virtuoso Tools.

Encounter Floorplanner is for timing driven and netlist driven layout with High Capacity and Perfromance.

BUT we have through Open Access put in place a smooth interface to exchange data between both environments. if you want you can share data easily and use the best of each Floorplanner.

• I'm trying to evaluate CPH and Floorplanner to see if they are valid options for top-down floorplanning, or just a waste of time.

Virtuoso is a hierarchical environment and the Floorplanner is really built to be hierarchical with top-down and bottom-up approches mixed together.If you need help please contact me.

Thanks for evaluating the Virtuoso Floorplanner .

Alex

 Hi Alex,

Thanks for replying to my forum post.

Our current evaluation is a design with a fair amount of hierarchy which uses standard cells.  No nmos/pmos transistors at his point.  I've worked with Encounter in the past, so I'm familiar with it's floorplanning functions.  My boss wants me to see if Virtuoso Floorplanner can give us an advantage earlier in our layout to shape blocks, optimize pins, implement schematic changes, etc.  The documentation gives a good introduction but  I'd  like to  see how it works in a real-world situation.

I would definitely like to see a demo from someone who is familiar with the capabilities, using our own data.  Let me know when this could be arranged.

Thanks,
Larry Humphreys
512-602-6164

p.s. I'm working from home today so you can reach me by email: larry.humphreys@amd.com

You could always try the radical step of invoking cdnshelp (or doing Help->Virtuoso Documentation from the Command Interpreter Window), and then in the documentation browser typing "Floorplanner" in the search box.

This is for IC61X (you didn't say which version you're using). In IC5141 the help tool is called "cdsdoc" (but can also be started from the CIW).

Regards,

Andrew.

If you have a sourcelink account you can read it online by clicking on this link:

http://support.cadence.com/wps/mypoc/cos?uri=deeplinkmin:DocumentViewer;src=pubs
;q=/fphelp/fphelp6.1.4/titlecopy.html

Thanks,

Alex