Placement of configurable input/output buffer structures during design of integrated circuits

Abstract

A tool for designing an integrated circuit and semiconductor product that generates correct RTL for I/O buffer structures in consideration of the requirements of diffused configurable I/O blocks and/or I/O hardmacs of the product. Given either a slice description of a partially manufactured semiconductor product, a designer can generate the I/O resources of an application set. Then given an application set having a transistor fabric, and the diffused configurable I/O blocks and/or the I/O hardmacs, and a plurality of accompanying shells, the I/O generation tool herein automatically reads a database having the slice description and generates the I/O buffer structures from the transistor fabric. The I/O generation tool further conditions and integrates input from either or both customer having her/his own logic and requesting a specific semiconductor product or from IP cores with their preestablished logic. The I/O generation tool creates correct RTL from the transistor fabric for correct placement, timing, testing, and function of I/O buffer amplifiers for the semiconductor product, either incrementally or globally. Once I/O buffer structures are created, they are qualified by a plurality of shells including a verification shell, a static timing analysis shell, a manufacturing test shell, and a RTL analysis shell.