Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Moscape, Inc.

Joydeep Mitra

Rajit Chandra

Kathirgamar Aingaran

Chandrasekhara Somanathan

Steven B Parks

Techniques for analyzing circuit designs based on assertions. An assertion is associated with a circuit structure from the circuit design. The assertion specifies a context of the circuit design in which the circuit structure is to be analyzed, an attribute associated with the circuit structure, and a constraint associated with the attribute. The present invention analyzes the circuit design based on assertions and checks to identify one or more instances of the circuit structure in the circuit design which do not satisfy the constraint specified in the assertion. An assertion may also indicate an action to be performed if the circuit structure does not satisfy the constraint specified in the assertion.

System and method for performing assertion-based analysis of circuit designs

An automated method of analyzing crosstalk in a digital logic integrated circuit on a digital computer is described. The method uses available software to make an extracted, parameterized netlist from a layout of the integrated circuit. The netlist has gate and black box invocations as well as transistor invocations. Library models are used to find driving resistances and capacitances associated with the gate and black-box invocations. For at least one potential victim wire of the plurality of wires, a subset of the wires of the chip are found to be potential aggressor wires to the victim wire. The aggressor wires are combined into a common aggressor. A risetime of the common aggressor is calculated and used to calculate the magnitude of coupled noise on the victim wire induced by the aggressor wires. An alarm threshold for each potential victim wire is determined based upon the type of logic gate that receives the victim wire. The alarm thresholds for each potential victim wire are compared to the calculated height of a coupled noise on the victim wire to determine which, if any, wires of the design suffer enough crosstalk noise that they should be redesigned.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Joydeep Mitra