Custom tools for IC LD evaluation

Integrated Circuits (ICs) have become backbone driving all electronic products in market; and with the advances of technologies in different domains have become highly complex. Lead by shrinking size, the number of the geometries in the IC Layout Designs (IC LDs) has exponentially increased and are approaching the gigs scale. In a fierily competitive market place of present times, to protect the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) on the IC Layouts generated at huge manpower and time efforts has become an important factor for survival. For the protection of IC LDs , the first steps is to be able to find from the prior-art analysis, whether any infringement is likely between the chip under design and any existing designs in the area. Both for the creator of the design and the chip IP granting authority , it is important to assess the non-commonness and distinctiveness of IC LD. Traditional VLSI ECAD tools are unable to offer robust confirmative assessment in this domain as discussed by the authors in previous work[1]. In this paper, customized ECAD suites of tools from Softjin are analyzed for comparing the two IC LDs for their uniqueness and possible similarities. Results of the example runs with the ICLDDTv2 tool are presented.