Day: April 18, 2019

Physical Design Introduction

What is Physical Design?

The process of converting a gate-level netlist (written using your Hardware Description Language(HDL)) into GDSII (Geometric Datastream) or physically realizable format(having geometric shapes) which finally becomes a hardware is called Physical Design.

fig: simple transistor level circuit converted into a physically realizable format

Structural representation to physical implementation (ie.,) Netlist to GDS.

Consists of 2 stages:

Placement & Routing (P&R)

Signoff

Objectives:

Timing

Congestion

Area

Power

Possible issues seen:

Timing violation

Congestion Issues

Design rule violations