Lsi Logic Corporation

Allen Wu

Christian Joly

Zarir B Sarkari

Francois Ducaroir

Dan Kochpatcharin

A method for creating a shell to represent a functional block of an IC design comprising of a plurality of interconnected functional blocks. The critical information from a synthesized gate level block is retained in the shell such that when analyzing the static characteristics of another block connected to the block now represented by the shell the analysis is still accurate. At a hierarchial level the present invention provides a method for analyzing the functional blocks of an IC design such that the memory requirement for storing the information of the functional blocks of the IC design is reduced as well as a decrease in run time.

Method for creating and using design shells for integrated circuit

Gate level netlists used for timing analysis in integrated circuit design are reduced using a timing shell generator while preserving critical information for timing analysis. After verification of timings, the gate level netlist is convened into a shell containing block boundary information. The function of the shell generator is to delete internal cells meeting a set of criteria. The result is a shell netlist containing a subset of the original netlist. Thus, the design cycle time involved and computing time and resources needed in ASIC development for chips using circuits represented by timing shell netlists are decreased by substituting design verification at the top level of large hierarchical netlists or large flat netlists by bottom up verification procedures using timing shells.

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Allen Wu