Enablement of Design Package Independent RTL Generation and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment Approach of Testcases

Abstract

The Design System Integration Test (DSIT) determines whether flow and design packages integrate correctly with the system. The design package owner, library owner, or IP owner first sends their IPs or libraries to the QA team to ensure that they work properly for each sub-flow of the reference workflow. As a result, DSIT QA is the company's first user of its developed intellectual property, libraries, or Memories. Owners update their IPs or libraries based on feedback from the QA team and then publish them for general users.

In that case, whenever a new version of the design system or design package is released, a Complete RTL2GDS flow for each component of the design package should be performed. It primarily includes tests for digital libraries, analog libraries, memories, macros, effuse libraries, and so on. As a result, RTL generation is performed for each design system using the TCL script. This is not designing package agnostic. As a result, flow automation is not possible. This leads to the idea of creating a generic design system script that is independent of design packages. Not only is it possible to reduce the budget in terms of man-months, but it is also simple to automate the entire process of RTL creation.

A generic script was developed that can build RTL for any design package or design system without requiring significant modifications. Additionally, a Python script was implemented to automate the RTL generation process. For each test case that is accessible for that Design Package, RTL is created. It shortens the five-to-six-man hours needed for one Design package. The RTL generation job can run overnight when this automation has been integrated with Jenkins. As a result, it requires less human effort and intervention. RTL automation of the RTL2GDS flow is the second phase. That needs a one-time setup for any Design package. Then, every time a new version is released, all the sub-flows can run overnight based on preceding information by triggering a Jenkins job.