Elecdra: a rule-based circuit analyzer for custom VLSI design

This paper presents procedures that verify custom CMOS/BiCMOS VLSI circuits for their compliance to a given set of pre-defined rules or design styles. Predefined rules range from simple connectivity and sizing rules to specific circuit topologies ensuring acceptable circuit speed, reliability, and signal integrity. Our compliance checker, Elecdra, operates on transistor-level circuit netlists, which may contain back-annotated parasitics. Custom VLSI microprocessors with over 3 million devices have been successfully verified by Elecdra at the full-chip level.