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Yossi Rindner
Ohad Meshulam
ASICServe ltd.
Hamanofim st. 11
Herzlia 46120
Israel
yossir@asicserve.com
ohadm@asicserve.com
www.asicserve.com
ABSTRACT
Taping out a chip requires substantial usage of PrimeTime which in turn generates very large
amount of reports. Analyzing these reports is error prune, time consuming and resulting in
schedule bottle neck. This paper describes an efficient and systematic method of managing and
speeding PrimeTime's reports analysis.
Table of Contents
Analyzing reports
One of the most time consuming parts is "Analyzing reports" stage as:
Most of STA sessions require reviewing reports related to the following topics:
• Clocks definitions.
• Check timing.
• Case analysis.
• Inter clocks slacks.
• Intra clocks slacks.
• IO definitions.
• IO slack.
• Asynchronous default slacks.
• Clock gating slacks.
• Exceptions considered.
• Exceptions ignored.
• Cross clocks paths.
• Specific paths.
Since the reports are closely related, any of the above actions will affect many of the reports,
which in turn will result in reviewing the reports all over again.
Being able to access the reports in an efficient way, while maintaining effective links between all
of them is crucial for:
For implementation of such platform, Microsoft XL and VBA programming language were
chosen as they have many built in features that made such choice only natural, as follows:
• Tabulation.
• Links.
• Sorting.
• Summation.
• Graphs.
Following paragraphs describe the rules and guidelines based on which such STA platform is
designed.
Implementation of the STA platform is not described as it is out-of-scope for this paper.
• Header
• None-linked columns (A,B,C)
• Linked columns (D,E,F,G)
Since analyzing violations requires, in most cases, reviewing of STA definitions, thus following
links to all definitions are integrated into STA panel:
• Column G:
o Clocks.
o Inputs.
o Outputs.
o Case analysis.
o Exceptions considered.
o Exceptions ignored.
PrimeTime's warnings are of most importance to realize that each STA session has all relevant
timing constraints correctly defined, for that reason access to check_timing information is
integrated into STA panel:
• Column G:
o Check timing.
• Column G:
o Specifics.
o Cross clocks.
o Regs per clock.
To complete the full STA picture, selected, non-timing related reports were added:
• Column G:
o Deep area.
o Memories.
o Black boxes.
o Hierarchy.
• Timing type.
• Asynchronous default.
• Clock gating default.
Figure 3 – STA panel, max and min timing, with marked differences.
• Async defaults:
o Recovery – setup analysis on asynchronous set/reset pins of flops.
o Removal – hold analysis on asynchronous set/reset pins of flops.
• Clock gating:
o Max – setup analysis between a clock and its enable signal.
o Min – hold analysis between a clock and its enable signal.
Figure 5 – Links from 'Slack only' specific endpoint to its verbose description.
Just in case that the nature of Start/End point clocks is "forgotten", a double click on any of the
highlighted clocks redirects to comprehensive report clock for "memory refreshment".
Intraclk violations have precedence over interclk, thus fixing the former will result in "clean"
Intraclk column and will allow focusing on Toclk violations which are coming from different
clocks and thus most likely can be handled by modifying timing constraints rather than
modifying the RTL or netlist.
3.8.1 Clocks.
PrimeTime's original report_clock includes two sections, 1st section with all clocks and 2nd
section with only generated clocks. A rather comprehensive presentation of such report would be
combined into a single section with related duty cycle and uncertainty parameters as shown in
figure below.
Figure 18 – 'Exceptions considered', 1st level representation with all related links.
5. Future developments.
5.1 SDC Interface.
In case of large timing exceptions, it's not possible to see them all via PrimeTime reports and the best
method is to check the SDC, having link between the Excel data base and SDC files would be of
added value.
The method described in this paper is planned to be extended into interface between PrimeTime
reports and SDC.
6. Acknowledgements.
My first acknowledgement goes to Synopsys Israeli office, mainly to Zohar Zolty and Moshe
Ashkenazi, for constructive feedbacks during preparation of this paper.
I used their SNUG papers as masters and resource of great examples on how to write SNUG
paper.
7. References.
SOLD (Synopsys On Line Documentation)