The untold story behind Integrated circuit design

The process of modern Integrated circuit design consists of two parts front end design and back end design
WORK OF FRONTEND ENGINEER:

1. RTL coding:  It deals with designing the architecture of chip, a basic skeleton of a circuit with the help of high-level HDL coding (VHDL or Verilog ). It is similar to design a pipeline to circulate the flow of water.
2. Synthesis: Synthesis transforms high-level Verilog/VHDL constructs, which don't have real physical hardware that can be wired up to do your logic, into low level logical constructs which can be literally modeled in the form of transistor logic or look-up tables or other FPGA or ASIC hardware components.
3. Verification: HDL model is then verified for Functional correctness using different verification methodologies and refined until the HDL model is proved to be meeting the specifications

 WORK OF BACK END ENGINEER:

 Deals with further manufacturing and fabrication process. There he fabricates designs onto silicon dies which are then packaged into ICs.
1.  Floorplanning and power planing: The physical design process starts with floor planning, where an engineer actually works with the core level circuit. He decides where to place basic blocks and how to route them, what is power requirements of the circuit and how to utilities it efficiently.

2. Placement: To locate the basic components and efficiently eliminating any timing constraints.

3.  Clock tree synthesis: As the circuit may use multiple clock sources such as PLLs, oscillators, etc. so a proper synchronization must be provided.

4. Physical verification: After completing the routing process. It is needed to inspect the process output, physical verification tools are needed to look for signoff LVS and DRC checks.

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