Unity Custom Digital Router

In the past few years, the size and complexity of custom digital designs have grown exponentially. Custom designers want to improve their productivity as they route these complex designs, but they cannot afford to compromise on quality. Traditional custom digital routers don’t provide the quality of results that leading-edge custom design teams require. The Cadence Unity Custom Digital Router gives custom designers a unique combination of patented routing technologies that enable a handcrafted, precise result to be achieved automatically.

Routing leading-edge custom digital designs has become a problem that is simply too large and too complex for manual routing approaches to be practical. Additionally, today’s leading custom process technologies have increasingly complex rules and constraints. They can have complex floorplans and more unusual design shapes, including extreme aspect ratios, all requiring specific and precise routing topologies. Traditional approaches to automating custom digital routing often fail to produce a usable result under these conditions. Many design teams have found that they spend as much or more time correcting automated results than they would have expended routing the complete design manually.

The Unity Custom Digital Router offers custom digital design teams a real solution: a unique combination of patented routing technologies that enable a precise, hand-crafted quality result to be achieved automatically. An advanced shape-based model is the foundation of the Unity Custom Digital Router that enables the seamlessly integrated suite of routing technologies to achieve optimal results. The Unity Custom Digital Router has been designed to work with the latest complex custom process rules and can handle extreme aspect ratios, minimal routing layers, and advanced floorplans. A comprehensive array of user-controlled routing constraints enables designers to obtain the precise results they require with automated speed.

Custom digital designs require precision routing results for a number of reasons: signal performance, signal integrity, limited design area, restricted routing layers, extreme aspect ratios, and circuit reliability. Cadence has worked with cutting-edge design teams for many years to address these challenges using its shape-based routing technology. Over this period, our team has developed a broad range of integrated, mature, and industry-tested custom-routing technologies that work in unison to produce the quality of routing results demanded by leading design teams.

The Unity Custom Digital Router is the only complete solution for precision routing of custom digital designs. It comprises a tightly integrated suite of shape-based routing technologies, including a maze-routing engine, comprehensive spine-and-stitch routing technologies, route pattern optimization engines, global routing, design rule check-and-fix technologies, and extensive constraint management. This unique product suite encompasses hundreds of specialized utilities that work together simply and seamlessly on the same shape-based data model.

The Unity Custom Digital Router includes step-by-step guided routing flows with a graphical user interface (GUI) showing each step and progress through the flow. The various flows are specific to commonly used routing methodologies. For example, the extreme aspect ratio routing flow includes tasks typically undertaken to route the peripheral logic of a memory design, an LCD driver, or any design area with an extreme aspect ratio. The guided flow informs designers of their progress through the flow and the prerequisites for each step. If the designer wants to leave the tool and return later, the guided flow keeps track of the completed steps. These guided flows can be customized by editing a template “theme” or adding new sub-flows to a theme.

The Unity Custom Digital Router also incorporates a powerful set of interactive and semi-automatic shape-based editing features, including an online design rule check (DRC) capability. This enables layout designers to complete manual routing operations error-free and DRC-correct every time. Using the Push feature, designers can move wires during interactive routing while maintaining the DRC correctness of the layout. The Auto Finish capability enables designers to start routing manually but then allows the router to finish the route automatically if the optimal route is not easily visible due to congestion. Unlimited Undo/Redo features enable fast iterations of editing and routing.