Unity Bus Planner

The First and Only Bus and Repeater-Cell Planning for Custom Microprocessor Designs.

Pulsic Unity Bus Planner is the first and only automated product to provide an easy, GUI-driven, guide-based methodology for interactive planning and routing of multiple large buses and associated repeater cells.

Automating a Critical Design Function

During the initial floorplanning phase of any design, the first steps are block placement, then power-grid planning, followed by bus planning and repeater-cell insertion. The goal of this process is to get parasitics for the critical datapaths to use in dataflow simulations as early in the design cycle as possible.

Accomplishing these tasks manually is both painstaking and error-prone. Internal tools are often difficult to maintain or not suitable for the automation required by larger chips.

Automation not only improves productivity but also quality, since these complex processes can be error-prone when done by hand.

Speed and Flexibility in a Complete Bus-Planning Flow

The bus-planning flow supported by Unity Bus Planner combines the speed and structure of digital design methods with the flexibility of a custom design solution.

Pulsic Unity Bus Planner is the first and only automated product to provide an easy, GUI-driven, guide-based methodology for interactive planning and routing of many hundreds of large buses with 1000+ bits per bus, along with their associated repeater cells. With the interactive and automated capabilities of Unity Bus Planner, designers can complete bus and repeater-cell planning in minutes or hours rather than in days or weeks.

In addition to bus planning and routing, Unity Bus Planner selects and sizes repeater cells to optimize timing. Unity Bus Planner also incorporates Pulsic DRC-correct, automated detailed routing for buses and repeater cells, which provides designers with instant feedback on whether a bus route meets design rules. Unity Bus Planner is able to accommodate changes to the netlist and recreate the previously defined buses and repeater-cell configurations automatically.

Benefits:

• Converge on a floorplan solution quickly through fast implementation analysis of global congestion due to buses and critical signals
• Obtain early access to parasitics data (SPF file) for critical datapath simulations
• Interleave multiple buses to allocate routing resources efficiently through the same physical location
• (more)
• Meet timing and slope requirements for top-level busses and critical signals early in the design process
• Avoid power grid issues through optimal placement of repeaters
• Avoid noise with robust shielding
• Handle netlist changes easily with the productivity and accuracy benefits of automatic place and route for critical buses

Features:

Each step supported by Unity Bus Planner may be performed on a single bus, several buses, or all the buses in a design.

• Bus-route planning: interactive planning for the paths (location and layer) of up to several hundred buses with 1000+ bits per bus
• Bus interleaving: interleaving the of segments of buses, primarily controlled by the relative position of guide segments
• Bus routing: executing the bus route plan down to detailed routing
• Repeater-cell plan generation: selection and optimization of the repeater cells for a bus
• (more)
• Repeater-cell placement: detailed placement of repeater cells and modification of the bus netlist to include the repeater cells
• Repeater-cell plan editing: interactive editing of the repeater cell plan for a bus. Interactive insertion of latches/registers into the repeater cell plan
• Repeater-cell routing: connection of the repeater cells to the bus routing
• Change management: easily return to the process and redo the steps to accommodate changes
• Logic-gate planning: interactive planning for the position of any logical gates (e.g., AND, OR) required for the buses