Auto-Waivers with Calibre nmDRC Recon

Nermeen Hossam, a Principal Product Manager in the DRC Physical Verification team at Siemens, introduces Calibre Auto-Waivers—a powerful tool within the Calibre nmDRC Recon suite designed to streamline DRC verification in early design stages.

Traditional DRC verification on full chip designs often leads to long runtimes and a plethora of violations, making debugging challenging. Calibre Auto-Waiver addresses this by selectively running relevant checks using Recon Check Selection and Recon Grey Box methodologies. Recon Check Selection runs a smaller rule deck tailored for early-stage verification, ensuring good coverage while minimizing runtime and memory consumption. Similarly, Recon Grey Box excludes non-essential areas from DRC, focusing only on critical interface regions.

To handle false violations introduced by Grey Box exclusion, Calibre Auto-Waiver generates waiver markers using specialized layers. These methodologies significantly reduce the size of DRC results databases, easing the debugging process.

Notably, these solutions are node-agnostic and require no modifications to foundry rule decks, making them versatile and easy to integrate into existing workflows. With growing design complexity, efficient debugging tools like Calibre nmDRC’s Auto-Waivers become essential for designers. The tool offers various debugging flows, including antenna debugging, providing fixing hints to expedite issue resolution.

In conclusion, leveraging Calibre Auto-Waivers can substantially improve turnaround time and efficiency in early-stage DRC verification, ensuring smoother design cycles and faster time to market.