An Efficient Metal ECO Methodology for Addressing Timing Violations with 10X Turnaround Time

Abstract

With increased design challenges and complexity, late metal ECOs (Engineering Change Order) have become a critical and integral part of the solution cycle for tape-ins which require faster turnaround time and reduced re-spin cost. Metal ECO is a process widely adopted by major IC design houses to solve the last-minute functional and timing failures. Challenges like the limitation of pre-injected resources, high manual efforts, and turnaround time make it difficult to implement practically in real-time designs. This paper presents a novel technique that deals with the automation of the metal ECO process to reduce the ECOs implementation cycle time by almost 10X, enabling the tape-in to be done at the earliest and making it a candidate of interest. In this paper, three phases of automation method are discussed which give an end-to-end solution for the metal ECO implementation addressing every possible corner case. This method has been successfully implemented for multiple designs and for all the designs a reduction of at least 10x is observed in turnaround time. For the efficacy of the method implemented, timing checks were done to ensure the required timing fixes and have been addressed with minimal manual efforts and turnaround time. These implementations reflect the actual problems faced by the designers, and obtained results show a promising solution to the problem.