Electrical analysis is crucial during the early stages of electronic designs. For example, designers need currents on terminals and voltages on nodes from simulations of the schematic to evaluate current densities throughout the routing and check those densities against electro-migration related limits, before the design is completed. For analog/mixed-signal designs, the design flows today are mostly manual, relying on separate front-end design by a schematic designer, who sizes or simulates the circuit schematic to build the schematic circuit elements or to meet performance goals, followed by hand-off to a layout designer who places and routes the design. The simulators may save, for example, current and voltage signals across various user selected nodes during the simulation of the circuit. The design environments provide, however, limited capabilities to view the raw simulation outputs and communicate this to the layout designer. For example, the designer may annotate the schematic with labels that represent the DC (direct current) voltages or transistor operating point information. These annotated labels may then be handed off to the layout designer along with some extra labels on the schematic to communicate the layout design intent. For example, some of these labels may identify critical pins (or nets) that the layout designer can use to calculate the width of the pin (or net) based on the maximum current density a piece of layout routing geometry may handle.
In addition, designers may desire to perform simulations of a design across multiple tests. For each of these multiple tests, designers may configure the simulation to run various types of analyses, such as a transient analysis or a DC analysis. The schematic designers may also desire to set up and run advanced analyses of various types, or to further manipulate various setups of the design or simulation tools to create multiple checkpoints from multiple simulation runs. This manual process makes it not only cumbersome but often impossible to analyze the relevant currents or voltages from the resulting simulation outputs from various combinations of the simulation results and correctly communicate that information to the layout designer manually.
Thus, there exists a need for providing a method, a system, and an article of creating or manipulating electrical data sets for an electronic design to better assist designers to communicate the electrical information obtained from various simulations or one or more combinations of various simulations at one abstraction level of the electronic design to designers working at a different abstraction level of the electronic design.