Match and Replace: A Functional ECO Engine for Multierror Circuit Rectification

Abstract

Functional engineering change order (ECO) is a popular technique for rectifying design errors after synthesis and placement stages. We present a new approach to generating the patch circuits for multierror circuit rectification. In this paper, we propose a two-phase approach of: 1) discovering the functional matches in two circuits followed by 2) determining the final patch circuits from the matches. The ECO engine in this paper discovers functional and structural matches in two circuits by coordinating the SAT-sweeping and the cut-matching algorithms. Then, the patch selection is conducted by the combinational equivalence checking technique and a linear-time selection heuristic. The experimental results on public benchmark and industrial circuits demonstrate that this ECO engine outperforms state-of-the-art interpolation-based engines.