At the very late design stage, engineering change order (ECO) leakage optimization is often performed to swap some cells for the ones with lower leakage, e.g. the cells with higher threshold voltage (Vth) or with longer gate length. It is very effective ...

Engineering change order (ECO) becomes a crucial element in VLSI design flow to rectify function or fix non-functional requirements in late design stages. Even though commercial ECO solutions are available, ECO remains much room for improvement due to ...

We first present historical view on the techniques for two-level and multi-level logic optimizations, and discuss the practical issues with respect to them. Then the techniques for sequential optimizations are briefly reviewed. Based on them, a new ...

With a functional Engineering Change Order (ECO) problem, the quality of patch plays an important role in the performance of the patched circuit. In this contest, contestants need to generate patch functions that will make two circuits equivalent, while ...

Equivalence checking and functional correction are important steps ensuring design correctness. Direct verification of large industrial designs is challenging and often requires a divide-and-conquer approach. The 2015 CAD Contest at ICCAD poses the ...

Equivalence checking (EC) and functional Engineering Change Order (ECO) on large-scale designs becomes a crucial industrial topic as the design scale expands. In this topic, we are especially interested in how to partition the large-scale problems into ...

To achieve timing closure, performance-driven optimizations are repeatedly performed throughout the modern IC design flow. Along with these optimization operations, how to incrementally update timing information efficiently and accurately becomes a ...

A LUT is implemented with a set of flipflops which are connected to a series of multiplexers, or alternatively with a small memory, and needs exponentially many storage elements with respect to the numbers of inputs. Due to this FPGA uses LUTs having ...

Modern IC designs are exposed to a wide range of dynamic variations. Traditionally, a conservative timing guardband is required to guarantee correct operations under the worst-case variation, thus leading to performance degradation. To remove the ...

In the IC industry, chip design cycles are becoming more compressed, while designs themselves are growing in complexity. These trends necessitate efficient methods to handle late-stage engineering change orders (ECOs) to the functional specification, ...

Contests and their benchmarks have become an important driving force to push our EDA domain forward in different areas lately, such as ISPD, TAU, DAC contests. To encourage better research development on timely and practical EDA problems across all ...

Due to the rapidly increasing design complexity in modern IC designs, metal-only engineering change order (ECO) becomes inevitable to achieve design closure with a low respin cost. Traditionally, preplaced redundant standard cells are regarded as spare ...

To cope with last-minute design bugs and specification changes, engineering change order (ECO) is usually performed toward the end of the design process. This paper proposes an automatic ECO synthesis algorithm by interpolation. In particular, we tackle ...

Metal-only ECO is prevalent at design houses to perform incremental design changes to resolve last found functional and/or timing failures. However, it is hard to perform mixed functional and timing changes manually. Prior endeavors focus on functional ...

This study formulates a novel routing problem of engineering change order- (ECO for short) aware Steiner minimal tree with obstacles and solves it by a multiple-stage approach, including partitioning, analysis distribution of spare cells, virtual node ...

We propose a new stable multiway partitioning algorithm,where stability is defined as an additional quality of a partitioningsolution. The stability of a partitioning algorithm isan important criterion for a partitioning based placement toachieve timing ...