a09 OpenPhySyn: An Open-Source Physical Synthesis Optimization Toolkit

Abstract Physical synthesis is a crucial phase in modern EDA design due to the challenges in achieving timing closure. Many approaches have been presented to solve different design problems and violations, such as buffer-insertion, gate-sizing, pin-swapping, gate-cloning, and logic transformations; each approach has different overhead costs in terms of area, power, and run-time. This paper describes OpenPhySyn, a new open-source EDA kit that implements and enhances different physical and logical design algorithms to resolve design violations and perform timing closure. The tool integrates seamlessly with standard EDA flows and tackles different types of violations with minimal human interference and reduced area overhead. Testing OpenPhySyn against different benchmarks with different characteristics from 46 violations up to 1200 violations showed that the tool solved most of the presented violations with only a 4\% average increase in the design area. Authors Ahmed Agiza [email protected] (Brown University) Sherief Reda [email protected] (Brown University)