Accurate and Consistent IP Waiver Management

Because waiver management has largely been a manual process until now, design rule waivers negotiated between intellectual property (IP) designers and foundries often reappeared as errors at the full chip level, indistinguishable from other DRC violations and requiring full debugging. This productivity “sinkhole” increases verification time without adding value.

Calibre Automatic Waivers uses industry-standard GDSII or OASIS layout formats to describe waived errors. As the IP designer validates the IP layout, error results that have been waived by the foundry can be stored with the original IP cell. By embedding waiver information into the IP, Calibre Automatic Waivers ensures that waiver details always remain with the IP in a standard format. Later, when DRC is run against a chip containing an IP with embedded waiver information, Calibre nmDRC automatically recognizes the waivers and separates them from true DRC errors.

You can trust Calibre’s results because the waiver process is fully verified as part of the rule deck qualification for the target manufacturing process. Calibre Automatic Waivers automatically and accurately removes all IP waivers from the DRC output, regardless of how or where the errors appear hierarchically. Calibre Automatic Waivers not only eliminates costly time and effort from the verification process, but also ensures accurate processing of all waiver information on every DRC run.

Full waiver reporting

All waivers are listed in DRC reporting for final review and auditability. In addition to waived results found, Calibre Automatic Waivers also reports waived locations not encountered during DRC.

Design features sometimes create an error in isolation that is eliminated when the features are placed in context. Alternatively, a waiver geometry may not meet the level of marginality required to eliminate a final error result.

Reviewing unused waiver geometries helps track the types of results that are typically corrected in context. Together, the list of waived results and list of “unused” waivers provide the integration designer with the documentation needed to record the history of waiver management in the design.

Reducing design verification time while simultaneously improving the quality of results can provide the market edge you need to stay ahead of your competition.