A Brief Overview of ASIC Design Flow

Raghav M
October 1, 2021
3:14 pm
249

A Brief Overview of ASIC Design Flow

Raghav M
October 1, 2021
3:14 pm
249

ASIC design flow is now a well-established and mature procedure. Until date, the overall ASIC design flow, as well as the different phases inside it, have proved to be both practical and resilient in multi-million dollar ASIC designs.

Every stage of the ASIC design flow has its own unique EDA tool that properly covers all parts of the work at hand. Most significantly, all EDA tools can import and export various file types, allowing for a flexible design flow that incorporates several vendors’ tools.

What is Exactly an ASIC physical design?

The ASIC design is not exactly a one-button operation. To succeed in this design process, you will need a solid and silicon-proven flow, a thorough grasp of the chip requirements and limitations, and complete mastery of the necessary EDA tools (and their reports!).

As it comes after the “front-end,” which is usually the initial element of any ASIC design, ASIC physical design is also referred to as “back-end design.” ASIC Physical Design is the component of the design that interacts with the physical world, including real-world constraints, performance, and behaviour.

What Is ASIC Design and How Does It Work?

ASIC design is a way of lowering the cost and size of an electronic circuit, product, or system by miniaturising and combining separate components and their functions into a single unit called an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC).

What are the major/basic steps in any ASIC physical design flow?

Design netlist – The design netlist lists a variety of functions that the chip must do as part of its design so that they may be checked off as they progress through the development process.
Partitioning – The components are then partitioned to ensure that they are all organised into logical groupings for quicker processing. The chip’s most efficient procedure can then be laid out via power planning.

Installation and Placement- During the placement procedure, engineers attach various components onto a prototype chip to see how they operate. During the prototype phase, optimization is usually performed to address the setup of the semiconductor design.
Clock tree synthesis – Before going on to the next stage of optimization, the chip is extensively tested to confirm that the placement optimization is proper and to solve a range of issues.
Routing- The technique of building physical connections based on logical connectedness is known as routing. Routing indicates the device’s limitations and timings for each individual circuit. The essential features are detailed and optimised at this point. Metal interconnects are used to link signal pins. Timing, clock skew, maximum trans/cap, and physical DRC criteria must all be satisfied using routed metal pathways.

What is the basic purpose of this design flow?

Changes in design tools, techniques, and software/hardware capabilities are necessary to meet the future needs of semiconductor design. Engineers have adopted an ASIC physical design flow for efficient structured ASIC chip architecture and an emphasis on its design features as a result of these improvements.

Digital design, Verilog for verification with various examples and projects, System Verilog and UVM, as well as laboratories and projects, are all covered in depth in the ASIC design Verification course only at ChipEdge, which is one of the best online learning institutes. During training and as part of the projects, two to three procedures will be discussed.

The ASIC Design Verification Course is created and presented by practising verification specialists in accordance with industry standards. Covering the ideas and technique is prioritised, with a strong emphasis on hands-on training. The supervised lab sessions and industry-standard projects account for 60% of the course time.