Conformal ECO Designer

Cadence^® Conformal^® ECO Designer enables you to implement RTL engineering change orders (ECOs) for pre- and post-mask layout, and offers early ECO prototyping capabilities for driving critical Yes/No project decisions.

ECOs have a wide variety of implementations that range from adding or removing logic in a design to more subtle changes such as cleaning up routing for signal integrity. All ECOs are focused on delivering products to market as fast as possible with minimal risk to correctness and schedule. ECOs can be a time of high stress, long work hours, and uncertainty. Even if the logic change is implemented in the netlist, there might not be enough spare gates on the mask to implement the change.

Features

• Enables front-end designers to quickly implement ECOs allowing earlier netlist handoff for implementation
• Improves designer productivity and offers flexibility to do ECO with metal-only layers, thus reducing manufacturing costs and driving faster design convergence toward tapeout
• Reduces verification time significantly by using abstraction techniques to verify multi-million–gate designs much faster than traditional gate-level simulation
• Decreases the risk of missing critical bugs through independent verification technology