RELI: An Integrated CAD System for Reliable VLSI Design

Current VLSI design tools fall short in their approach to automating the reliability analysis during the design process. The manual burden of these checks then falls heavily on the designers.Systems & Processes Engineering Corporation (SPEC) has developed the system concept of the RELI, an integrated design system for reliable VLSI design. In the RELI system, long term reliability problem such as electromigration, hot electron degradation and short term problems such as ground bounce and voltage drop will be studied in terms of power bus, fanin/fanout, function implementation, and circuit application in the case of ASICs and the trade offs of reliability with speed, area, and power.The RELI system checks the circuit structures and design styles. It addresses the issues of the noise margin, input and output slew rates, voltage supply, input thresholds, buffering, and clocking schemes. It analyses the fault tolerance circuit techniques related to the reliability issues.The RELI system will guide the design processes during the design synthesis and component instantiation phase, and the floorplanning, place and route phase. The design of the Flexible User Interface (FUI) will allow the system to be integrated into various design systems which support the VHDL top down design methodology.