Overview of Physical Design Flow

Physical Design Flow

Physical Design Flow

1. Partitioning: A chip may contain several million transistors. Due to the limitations of memory space and computation power available it may not be possible to layout the entire chip (or generically speaking any large circuit) in the same step.

VLSI design flow

VLSI Design Flow

VLSI design Flow

The VLSI design cycle starts with a formal specification of a VLSI chip, follows a series of steps, and eventually produces a packaged chip. A typical design cycle may be represented by the flow chart shown in Figure. Our emphasis is on the physical design step of the VLSI design cycle. However, to gain a global perspective, we briefly outline all the steps of the VLSI design cycle.