No Exact Pin Match

Physical Synthesis is more and more popular in logic synthesis. Physical Synthesis tool, DCT in topographical mode for example, may add hierarchical pins that are not in RTL code and it may cause mapping issue when Implementation Netlist is comparing with Reference Netlist in ECO.

For example, DCT may add 'IN0', 'IN1', 'IN2' ... to hierarchical modules. The new added pins are not necessarily matching to each other in Implementation Netlist and Reference Netlist. That is, IN0 in module A in Reference Netlist maybe a different signal from IN0 in module A in Implementation Netlist.

Figure 1: No Exact Pin Match

These pins are randomly named in each run. They won't affect logic equivalence check, but they need to be excluded in pin matching in ECO. Otherwise, the ECO tool would insert redundant logic or wrong logic.

API set_noexact_pin_match can be used to resolve the mapping issue between Implementation Netlist and Reference Netlist.

By adding the port naming regular expression in the API argument, set_noexact_pin_match('\bIN\d+\b'), these ports will be remapped.

Note: This API should be run before reading designs.

Check No Exact Pin Match in user manual