International Business Machines Corporation

Friedhelm Kessler

Wilhelm Ernst Haller

Elmar Gaugler

Matthias Klein

Ulrich Weiss

Thomas Makowski

George Diedrich Gristede

Harald Mielich

The invention relates to a method and a system for repartitioning a formalized hardware description of a hierarchically structured electronic circuit design unit comprising a plurality of macros in terms of latch macros and combinatorial macros. In a first step, each macro is dissected into latch macros and signal cones in such a way that

Method and system for repartitioning a hierarchical circuit design

The invention relates to a method and a system for repartitioning a formalized hardware description of a hierarchically structured electronic circuit design unit comprising a plurality of macros in terms of latch macros and combinatorial macros. In a first step, each macro is dissected into latch macros and signal cones in such a way that Subsequently, combinatorial macros are created by merging combinatorial signal cones along unit signal paths.

A method includes removing a code segment from a hardware description language design to create a modified hardware description language design. The code segment represents at least one time sensitive path in the hardware description language design. The method includes creating a delta list of differences between the modified hardware description language design and a physical hardware representation that is logically equivalent to the hardware description language design. The method includes extracting a portion of the physical hardware representation that corresponds to the time sensitive path based, at least in part, on the delta list. The method also includes creating a structured hardware description language design of the time sensitive path using the extracted portion of the physical hardware representation, wherein the structured hardware description language design comprises structural information of the extracted portion of the physical hardware representation.

Reusable structured hardware description language design component

The invention relates to a method and a system for placing macros of a multilevel hierarchical description of a design unit on a chip. The method starts off by repartitioning the macro structure of the design unit into a set of latch macros and a set of combinatorial macros. By definition, a combinatorial macro is constructed in such a way that it contains no latches, and a latch macro contains latches and is constructed in such a way that each primary input/output of the latch macro coincides with an input or an output of a latch within said latch macro. After repartitioning the macro structure, the latch macros are synthesized within temporary boundaries and placed on the chip. Subsequently, the combinatorial macros are sequentially placed within a temporary boundary and synthesized one by one.

Method and system for placement of electronic circuit components in integrated circuit design

According to the present invention a method for the placement of electronic circuit components is provided that supports design modifications by realizing and maintaining relations between the layouts of the components (ito i). These relations are based on relations between the geometrical shapes represented by the layouts for the components. The invention can be implemented by an interactive layout editor. When a layout or the placement of a layout is changed manually, then the placement of the components that are placed already is changed automatically such that the all the relations between the components are realized or maintained. A parent-child relationship can be defined between components such that when the parent component is changed or moved then only the placement of its children is updated automatically. The prioritisation of relations allows resolving conflicts between conflicting relations.

Growing community of inventors

Boeblingen, Germany

Friedhelm Kessler