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Understanding the Technical Features of StarRC Merge Corners

Traditionally parasitic extraction tools apply single process corner variation to the entire design and designer will run various process corners to do complete clarity check on the design. With advanced nodes the margins for design are reducing and to identify your worst-case process corner requires some flexibility on part of the parasitic extraction tool. StarRC Merge Corners feature provides the necessary flexibility to the designer so that different process corners can be assigned to different sections of the same design. Yet another feature from StarRC to provide more control to the designer during design phase.

Transcript:

My name is Mani Woodroffe, and I'm a senior staff applications engineer supporting the STARC product at Synopsys. In this short video, I'm going to discuss the merge corners feature of STARC. The merge corners feature gives the designer the flexibility to create custom corners for parasitics and increases the chance of catching an out-of-spec design before tapeout.

STARC gives the user the ability to extract multiple types of corners in a single extraction. These corners can be process corners, temperature corners, and/or density corners, to name a few. As shown in the image, a designer can assign corner A to certain nets and corner B to other nets. The STARC merge corners feature will generate a single netlist containing all nets extracted at their specified corners, which can then be passed on to a simulator.

The result is yield improvement and cost savings due to a reduced number of respins. In the application example, the data line being slow and the clock line being fast may violate setup time for the digital block.

This would not be caught in a typical corner extraction and simulation where all sections of the circuit are combined within one type of corner. However, with the merge corner capability, the data line can be extracted at the slow corner and the clock line can be extracted at the fast corner all within the same netlist, allowing the setup time to be better analyzed.

In conclusion, STARC is the golden sign-off extraction tool, and we are continuously improving performance and adding features to increase designers' productivity. The merge corners feature is yet another addition that provides flexibility to designers while improving correlation to silicon.