Physical Design is a process of transforming a circuit description into physical layout which describes the position of cells and routes for the interconnections between them. It is the result of a synthesized netlist that has been placed and routed. The design flow deals with various steps involved such as follows: Synthesized netlist ⇓ Partitioning ⇓ Sanity checks ⇓ Floorplan ⇓ Power plan ⇓ Placement ⇓ Clock Tree Structure (CTS) ⇓ Routing ⇓ Signoff Sanity checks has to be performed before every stage in order to check whether our design is meeting the requirements for the next stage (or) whether its properly designed. Basically, a code(program) is developed that explains us the RTL characteristics of the chip to be designed. That will be done by the front end engineers(RTL design team). The developed code is then compiled and as a result, a synthesized netlist is obtained. It contains the gate level model for the respective RTL code. .def is the output file at each s...
ASIC Flow : System Specification (idea) ⇓ Architectural Design (data flow) ⇓ Functional Design ⇓ RTL Design and Verification ⇓ Synthesis ⇓ Physical Design ⇓ SignOff (PV, STA , LEC ..) ⇓ Fabrication ⇓ Testing ⇓ Packaging ⇓ Final Chip VLSI designing is divided into front end and back end. Till synthesis stage, comes under frond end designing. Remaining steps are treated as back end. After synthesis and before physical design, there is DFT team for testing of connectivity of the cells, inserts scan chains etc.., DFT team also tests the chip after fabrication of the chip. Based on the market survey results, we will finalize our system specifications. Architectural design : Gives dataflow diagram required to design the chip. RTL design : Writes the RTL code by using Verilog, VHDL, System Verilog, UVM etc.., Design Verification : Verifies the consistency of the given RTL code. Synthesis : converts RTL code into gate level netlist. Physical D...