CoRe-ECO: Concurrent Refinement of Detailed Place-and-Route for an Efficient ECO Automation

Abstract

With the relentless scaling of technology nodes, physical design engineers encounter non-trivial challenges caused by rapidly increasing design complexity, particularly in the routing stage. Back-end designers must manually stitch/modify all of the design rule violations (DRVs) that remain after automatic place-and-route (P&R), during the implementation of engineering change orders (ECOs). In this paper, we propose CoRe-ECO, a concurrent refinement framework for efficient automation of the ECO process. Our framework efficiently resolves pin accessibility-induced DRVs by simultaneously performing detailed placement, detailed routing, and cell replacement. In addition to perturbation-minimized solutions, our proposed SMT-based optimization framework also suggests the adoption of alternative master cells to better achieve DRV-clean layouts. We demonstrate that our framework successfully resolves from 33.3% to 100.0% (58.6% on average) of remaining DRVs on M1-M3 layers, across a range of benchmark circuits with various cell architectures, while also providing average total wirelength reduction of 0.003%.