Match and replace — A functional ECO engine for multi-error circuit rectification

Functional ECO has been an indispensible technique in modern VLSI design flow. This paper proposes an ECO engine in a two-phase approach: a matching phase for rectification pair identification and a replacement phase for pair selection and patch minimization. The rectification pair identification algorithm explores rectification pairs between the original circuit and the golden circuit. The rectification pair selector determines final patches through a linear-time heuristic. A gate-recycle process performs patch minimization for final refinement. The experiments show that this ECO engine outperforms a state-of-the-art interpolation-based engine in both patch quality and runtime.