Automation Checks during PNR flow in IC Design

Abstract

Automation is a technology in that there are different kind of approaches and procedures can be referred. The process of turning manual checks to automatic checks provides impressive benefits. Time saving, cost effective, higher quality, accurate result, less error in the tests which normally caused by human are the most important reasons to thinking about automation. The first and foremost step is to find out what should be automated. It is important to know the reason of automation if, it is worth or not. Here, the question is based on which reason it should decide for automation? For instance, after finishing all the runs of Innovus, Voltus, Pegasus, Quantus top level person must verify that whether it is meeting the specifications or not for checking that they need to go through all the audit files. Audit files doesn’t contain detailed information’s like incremental tag, tool version, time stamp, md5sum’s, waivable warnings, must fix warnings, must fix errors, input directory paths, Bump locations and VDD and VSS locations etc. and other factor is Time consuming.By doing automation it will gives required detailed information like latest incremental tag and tool version, md5sum its unique id, time stamp, errors, warnings, setup and hold views etc. so it can be automated by developing script using programming language called TCL (tool command language). These scripts will work for any block of a chip which is of 16nm technology.