All formal verification tools, including Electrical Rules Check (ERC), must reach a trade-off between “false negatives” (i.e., real design errors that are not detected) and “false positives” (or false errors, locations where errors are erroneously reported. This...
Conditional high-impedance (HiZ) nets errors are among the most serious risks in an IC project because of their capacity to elude Silicon qualification phases and escape into mass-production. They may create a wide range of issues throughout the Validation,...
Weeks before tapeout, SoC design teams must verify large mixed-signal transistor-level netlists. The standard approach is to verify functionality by running simulations with back-annotated gate-level RTL along with behavioral analog blocks. However, since this...
Electrical Rule Checking (ERC) solutions face a double challenge: handle the billions of transistors of a chip and be accurate enough to detect all failure modes. Any solution that doesn’t have a good understanding of the function of each transistor and the electrical...
The verification of electrical errors at chip-level has always been the missing step in chip design closure – even though a chip is, basically, a very large circuit. The complexity of such an analysis has so far made it impossible. Consequently, considerable effort is...
