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Book Constraining Designs For Synthesis and Timing Analysis PDF

This summarizes a book review of "Constraining Designs for Synthesis and Timing Analysis" by Sridhar Gangadharan and Sanjay Churiwala. 1) The reviewer found the book to be highly readable and helpful for understanding design constraints even as a novice to the topic. 2) Each chapter clearly develops a different constraint topic. 3) The only criticism is that the book lacks a chapter discussing how constraints evolve through a design process and when to run static timing analysis.

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Simranjeet Singh
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998 views

Book Constraining Designs For Synthesis and Timing Analysis PDF

This summarizes a book review of "Constraining Designs for Synthesis and Timing Analysis" by Sridhar Gangadharan and Sanjay Churiwala. 1) The reviewer found the book to be highly readable and helpful for understanding design constraints even as a novice to the topic. 2) Each chapter clearly develops a different constraint topic. 3) The only criticism is that the book lacks a chapter discussing how constraints evolve through a design process and when to run static timing analysis.

Uploaded by

Simranjeet Singh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Book: Constraining Designs for Synthesis and

Timing Analysis
Brian Bailey - August 12, 2013

The book Constraining Designs for Synthesis and Timing Analysis: A practical guide to Synopsys
Design Constraints (SDC) written by Sridhar Gangadharan of Atrenta and Sanjay Churiwala of Xilinx
is a highly readable book that enabled me to understand the complexities of a design task that I have
never had to perform myself. In that regard, this review must be taken as coming from someone who
is a novice and who did not have the opportunity to find out if I had learned the subject enough to be
able to practice it myself. I also want to point out that while one of the authors of this book comes
from an EDA vendor it is completely unbiased and at no place does it even mention tools that
Atrenta may have available to help with the problem – so rest assured that this is not a thinly
disguised sales pitch.

Contents and Excerpt

1. Introduction
2. Synthesis Basics
3. Timing Analysis and Constraints
4. SDC Extensions through TCL
5. Clocks
6. Generated Clocks – This chapter is excerpted here. I was asked by Springer not to publish the
entire chapter, so it has been cropped. The missing segments are – Shifting the edges, More
than one clock on the same source, enabling combinational path and generated clock gotchas.
7. Clock Groups – This chapter will be excerpted in the future
8. Other Clock Characteristics
9. Port Delays
10. Completing Port Constraints
11. False Paths
12. Multi-Cycle Paths
13. Combinational Paths
14. Modal Analysis
15. Managing your Constraints
16. Miscellaneous SDC Commands
17. XDC: Xilinx Extensions to SDC

Review

The book is well structured and reads easily. Each chapter takes on a subject and develops it well. If
I have one complaint about this book it is that there is a chapter missing. They talk at several points
in the book about how certain constraints are estimated, or that information is not available until a
certain point in the flow. They also talk about how static timing can be useful at certain points in the
flow for ascertaining different types of timing checks. While I understand that every company uses
different tools and flows, I would have liked to see a chapter that talked about the writing and
evolution of the constraints during the design process. What things should companies focus on at
certain points in the flow? When should the constraints be updated? When should static timing be
run? What useful information will it provide? This could have also included a larger, more typical
example, and while I understand that the constraints files can become very large, it would have been
helpful to look at something a designer may face. The actual constraints files could have been made
available online and small parts of it described in the chapter.

These comments should not detract from the fact that I would highly recommend this book to
anyone who needs to get acquainted with timing constraints. I feel that I could start writing them
myself after reading this book.

More information

The book is 253 pages and lists at $119. More information can be found on the Springer site and
the book is available slightly cheaper on Amazon.

Has anyone read this book who has written timing constraints, or who managed to write any after
reading this book? I would love to hear your views about the book.

Brian Bailey – keeping you covered

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