FEEP: Functional ECO Synthesis with Efficient Patch Minimization

Abstract

Functional engineering change order (ECO) has been an essential process in modern complex integrated circuit design. Finding a high-quality circuit patch efficiently has long been a challenge. This paper proposes FEEP, an automatic and efficient synthesis-based functional ECO method. Structural pruning and stratified searching techniques are proposed to minimize search space without extra logical equivalence checks. Moreover, we propose a machine-learning-based two-stage patch size predictor that assists in predicting patch quality. Experimental results show that our algorithm can efficiently search and produce high-quality patches under various test cases.