The Tweaker solution is the first and only complete ECO Platform with flexible flow control and integrated GUI, which handles all challenging capacity and complexity issues within ECO framework in a single machine.
Lowering Tapeout Risks with Advanced Technology to Overcome Today’s ECO Closure Challenges
As an ECO tool, Tweaker optimizes a design incrementally and locally, with minimal impact to the existing performance. In either functional ECO or timing ECO, Tweaker only focuses on only critical portions of a design, known as the "ECO Domain". For this reason, Tweaker can handle large designs in a very short turn-around time.
Timing/power optimization tools require MMMC (Multi-Mode, Multi-Corner) support as a basic ECO feature. Tweaker’s ECO-specific architecture takes the MMMC feature further by focusing only on the “ECO Domain” while covering all sign-off scenarios. Due to capacity and runtime concerns, P&R tools are often unable to handle all sign-off scenarios. In the ECO phase, however, Tweaker allows users to fix timing violations and optimize leakage/dynamic power under the scope of all sign-off scenarios.
Aside from MMMC support, Tweaker is most celebrated for its physical awareness, which is essential to precise RC and timing estimation. In contrast with other timing ECO solutions that lack physical awareness, Tweaker’s ability to analyze and apply physical information produces a reduction in ECO iteration count. In Tweaker’s manual ECO mode, users can see the input physical layout to choose optimal ECO cell locations. As a result, Tweaker consideration of physical information eases communication between a project’s logic team and physical team.