Integrated circuits (ICs) power everything around us — smartphones, laptops, electric vehicles, satellites, and even medical equipment. But how does a digital circuit become a real silicon chip? This transformation happens during Physical Design (PD) in VLSI. Physical Design (PD) is the process of transforming a synthesized gate-level netlist into a manufacturable IC layout that meets performance, power, and area requirements while obeying foundry design rules. The output of physical design is … [Read more...]