It is self-evident that large systems of any type would not be possible without hierarchical design. Decomposing a large system objective into subsystems, and subsystems of subsystems, has multiple benefits. Smaller subsystems can be more easily understood and better tested when built, robust 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] party alternatives may be available for some subsystems, large systems can be partitioned among multiple design teams and complete system implementation can (in principle) be reduced to assembly of finished or nearly finished subsystems.
But what makes for an optimal implementation doesn’t always align well with the partitioning that best served the purposes of logic design. Physical design teams have known this for a long time and have driven physical tool vendors to add many enhancements in support of:
- Adjusting logic partitioning to better balance sizes for physical units
- While also minimizing inter-block routing to reduce demand on top-level routing resources
- Reducing delays in long inter-block signal routes with block feedthrus
- Duplicating high-fanout ports or even logic to reduce congestion
These methods worked well and still do, to some extent, but they paper over a rather obvious problem. The burden of resolving mismatches between logic and physical structure falls entirely on the physical design team yet the line between logical and physical design is more blurred than it used to be, increasing the likelihood of iteration between these phases and therefore repeated effort and delay in re-discovering optimal implementation strategies on each iteration. In a climate of aggressive shift-left to minimize time to market and increasing cost-sensitivity disallowing any sub-optimal compromises, this approach to optimizing the logic/implementation divide is not moving in the right direction.
For those who don’t understand why logical and physical design have become so entangled, here’s a brief recap of a few examples. I’ve mentioned before the effects of low-power structure. Similar power islands may appear in widely separated parts of the logic hierarchy, yet there are obvious area and PG routing benefits to combining such logic into a single power island. But this restructuring can’t simply be moved to physical design, because changes like this must also be reflected in the RTL netlist and power intent for functional/power verification. Or think about MBIST insertion. It would be impossibly expensive to require one MBIST controller per memory in a design containing thousands of memories, so controllers are shared between memories. But the best sharing strategy depends heavily on the floorplan, and changing the strategy obviously affects the RTL netlist and DFT verification. Or think of a safety-critical design in which a better implementation suggests duplicating some logic. If that logic has been fault-injection tested, it’s not clear to me that it can simply be duplicated in implementation without being re-verified in fault-testing.
