Outsourcing your ASIC development project to an ASIC design company but don’t know what to expect or how the process will work?
Don’t worry; this post has got you covered.
Today, we’ll take a look at the operational flow of an outsourced ASIC design and manufacturing process and will briefly discuss the different stages and steps that entail the process.
ASIC Design and Manufacturing
A typical ASIC design and manufacturing process is divided into four main stages:
- Front-end design stage
- Back end design stage
- Fabrication stage
- Packaging stage
The first stage in the design process is the front-end design stage, which starts with specifying device functionality and specs.
In this step, you’d brief the design company about the requirements of your project, that is, what type of device you want to build, what functions it should have, and what special features and specifications it should possess.
Based on your specified requirements, the vendor will produce a sample micro-architecture. They will share the micro-architecture with you, and if you are happy with it, they will send it for RTL designing.
In the RTL design step, the company will work on producing circuit-level design for each block comprising the design of your ASIC. Individual teams will work on individual blocks to ensure you get a highly optimized ASIC for your product.
Once the RTLs have been designed, they will then be tested for functionality using a variety of test vectors.
The next step in the front-end design stage is synthesis. This step comprises of three parts: translation, optimization and mapping.
The overall objective of the synthesis stage is to accomplish a technology-dependent ASIC design.
Here, using different EDTA tools and technology library files, design engineers will produce gate-level Verilog netlist files and SDC files which will be used for back-end designing—the second stage in the ASIC design and manufacturing process.
Before the start of the back-end design stage, the generated netlist and SDC files will be tested for functionality. Once they are cleared, they will then be sent for development to produce alayout of the ASIC.
The production of the integrated circuit layout is called back-end designing. This layout is basically the geometrical representation of the ASIC, and it must conform to geometric rules, geometric constraints and system specs imposed by technology files.
After back-end designing is complete, the files generated from the process will be sent to a fabrication plant, where they will be prepared for the fabrication stage.
In the fabrication stage, the design company will fabricate the integrated circuit layout onto silicon dies, which will then be processed and packaged to yield ASIC units.
And that’s that;hope you found the information useful.
If you have any additional questions about ASIC design process or are interested in outsourcing your ASIC development project, feel free to reach out; ADSANTEC will be happy to assist you.