Powerful Design Style
Electric has a powerful way of doing integrated circuit (IC) layout. The system considers integrated circuits to be composed of nodes and arcs. Nodes are circuit elements such as transistors and contacts. Arcs connect the nodes. This style of design is quite different from typical IC layout systems, such as Magic and Cadence, which do IC layout by manipulating polygons on different layers of the wafer.
This powerful design style makes it possible for the designer to run Layout Versus Schematic (LVS) on layouts which are not yet Design Rule Check (DRC) clean. This is extremely useful during the design process. It also makes it possible for the design tool to back-annotate wire-lengths from a layout to a schematic even if the layout is not yet DRC clean. Finally, because layouts are stored internally as a graph (rather than "paint"), the LVS check is exceptionally fast, often running in under a second on full-chip designs (such as the recent Marina chip). The ability to run LVS near-instantaneously on large designs has a big impact on ease of design.
It has been observed that people with no previous experience in IC layout are comfortable with Electric's unusual style, but those who have done IC layout on other systems find Electric difficult to use.
One added advantage of the nodes-and-arcs view of a circuit is that it is possible to add layout constraints to the arcs. There are only a small set of these constraints, but with careful placement, the circuit can be programmed to stay properly connected when physical changes are made.
Read more about this topic: Electric (software)
Famous quotes containing the words powerful, design and/or style:
“A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)