Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote, and advance system-level design, modeling, and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. We are composed of a broad range of members that fully support the work of our technical committee to develop technology standards that are balanced, open, and benefit the worldwide electronics industry. Leading companies and semiconductor manufacturers around the world are using our electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards in a wide range of projects in numerous application areas to develop consumer, mobile, wireless, automotive, and other “smart” electronic devices. Through an ongoing partnership with the IEEE, standards and technical implementations developed by Accellera Systems Initiative are contributed to the IEEE for formal standardization and ongoing governance.
Ashfaq Khan, Intel Corporation; Shuhui Lin, Intel Corporation; Daniel Standring, Intel Corporation; Adam Campos, Intel Corporation; Satish Venkatesan, Intel Corporation; Soowan Suh, Intel Corporation
A typical VLSI implementation starts from a logical or architectural view of the design in RTL, where multiple building blocks are connected without considering physical constraints. This view then goes through a series of modifications required to meet structural design (SD) and manufacturability needs. While some of these modifications enjoy automation through industry standard EDA tools (e.g., DFT insertion), majority of them are currently implemented manually by designers and are considered regular design activity. To make matters worse, some of these steps often need to be repeated based on the feedback from the downstream consumers of the design. In this paper we demonstrate that, with the recent advancements of the EDA industry, many of these activities can now be automated in the form of RTL Transformation. Such transformations include, but are not limited to, Physical Hierarchy restructuring, Feedthrough/Tie-off/Repeater insertion, Clock/Reset re-distribution, Fuse isolation etc. Our methods combine user spec and home-grown code with industry standard EDA tools to achieve RTL transformations on the fly as part of the RTL generation flow. This is a paradigm shift in RTL development, resulting in order of magnitude improvement in design turn-around time (TAT). We describe several applications/transformations from a production use case where multiple weeks of design work have been either fully eliminated or reduced to a fraction of the original TAT, depending on the type of the transformation. We also present various best-known methods (BKMs) and gotchas that need to be considered while performing RTL transformation to achieve the best results, given the current state of the EDA tools.