AST’s paper “Constraints Management Toolkit (CMT) for Synopsys Flow” won the 9th Annual SNUG Israel Special Award. The paper was presented by our Engineering Manager, Mr. Chen Eyal.
The presentation abstract is shown below:
One of the challenges of ASIC design is managing the timing constraints throughout the various steps of the design and implementation phases: from RTL through logic synthesis, P&R, Signal-Integrity and to sign-off STA.
The timing constraints are usually derived from the system requirements and are documented in a Device Specification. The Design Specifications has to be translated into a set of timing constraint TCL commands. The TCL scripts are used for Synthesis, P&R and Timing Sign-Off by the implementation/verification tools. The constraints are usually written and handled using long and complicated TCL scripts, and only the designer who wrote them can really understand what is going on there. Additionally, there’s no standard in the industry for design constraining, therefore designers from different groups/companies working together on the same project may have misunderstandings and/or gaps in the timing coverage of the design.
This paper presents a solution we developed at AST for managing ASIC design constraints. Our solution, called Constraint Management Toolset (CMT), supports the constraint management from the Design Specification through all the design implementation phases to the STA results presentation and review. We are using the highest level of data, such as oscillator frequency, duty cycle, jitter etc. directly from the Design Specification. This data is managed in Excel worksheet template, which is very friendly and easy to update and review. CMT automatically generates TCL scripts, out of the Excel worksheet, creating clock definitions, domain relationships, interface timing constraints, mode definitions and exceptions (false path, multi-cycle etc.). We will demonstrate in this article that our solution can handle a complete set of constraints from RTL to sign-off STA, using a single database.
For more details you can contact: Orly Ellison Marketing Manager