Hardware Design Rule Checker Using a CAM Architecture

This paper presents a hardware implementation of design rule checker using a specialized Content Addressable Memory (CAM) for the Manhattan geometric designs. Two dimensional relationships between rectangular objects in a design are checked with one dimensional design rules. The input data is processed by the pixel pre-processor in such a way that direct comparison between the input data and the stored rules in the CAM is possible. The comparison by the CAM reduces the number of memory references and logic operations of pattern matching and the simple architecture of the system enables a low cost implementation.