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Design Planning and Analysis Flow
The Virtuoso Design Planning and Analysis (DPA) flow is a schematic-driven flow that offers an innovative solution for designs that have unimplemented layout views existing at the top level and the levels below and where the schematic has a hierarchy and some or all levels of the schematic hierarchy have unimplemented layout views. Usually, for such designs, the placement at the top level is oblivious to the actual lower-level instances, so the top-level placement is often based on estimation. After the design is routed, there might be changes needed to the top level that are often expensive to accommodate.
The Design Planing and Analysis flow is illustrated below.
In the Design Planning and Analysis flow, you can seamlessly layout, place, and route, backed by real routing data.
The key steps in the Design Planning and Analysis flow are:
- Generation: DPA supports full hierarchical generation capabilities, which allow you to effectively plan the connectivity- and constraint-riven flows in Virtuoso Layout Suite EXL. The DPA flow uses the existing schematic hierarchy, where available, to create a virtual hierarchy that can be realized, when appropriate.
- Placement Planning: With the DPA tool, you have the ability to plan, visualize, and edit through the hierarchy—improving manual, assisted, and automatic placement. Blocks that have an existing IP in place and soft blocks from an existing Virtuoso Floorplanner flow are both recognized by the DPA flow as valid inputs for design planning. Making decisions based on the context of the full design allows for less expensive iterations, resulting in substantial productivity gains.
- Pin Planning: Not only does the DPA tool give you the advantage of hierarchical pin planning and optimization, it also enables you to perform congestion-aware pin placement through the hierarchy.
- Global Route Planning and Congestion Analysis: In the DPA flow, you can run congestion analysis earlier in the design lifecycle, allowing you to visualize available routing resources in your floorplan, saving expensive iterations. Additionally, this can help you clear congested areas, leading to better convergence and reduced floorplan area.
Related Topics
Layout Component Generation in Design Planning and Analysis
Placement of a Virtual Hierarchy
Congestion Analysis and Global Routing Support in DPA
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