Hi! We are happy to announce that InTime now supports the inheritance of Auto Placement assignments. This means that LogicLock or LogicLock Plus assignments created via the Auto Placement recipe will be passed onto its child revisions.
For example, Tommy ran his design in InTime for three rounds.
1st round : InTime Default
2nd round: Auto Placement
3rd round : Placement Seed Exploration
At the end of each round, Tommy selects the best timing result as the parent revision for the next round. The figure below shows the InTime results after Tommy completed all the three rounds.
With the inheritance of Auto Placement assignments, the LogicLock or LogicLock Plus assignments from revision arealocked_origin_x16_y89 are passed to the child revisions.
Auto Placement with Inheritance
Auto Placement without Inheritance
With this combination, the Total Negative Slack (TNS) improves from -36.063ns in the 1st round to -31.923ns in the 2nd round, to -30.979ns in 3rd round. Depending on the design, you may want to try other combinations or sequences of recipes. The LogicLock or LogicLock Plus assignments will be inherited by child revisions as long as they are in the same tree.