Rethinking Chip Debug

The semiconductor industry has spent decades mastering the art of integrated circuit physical verification. But as system-on-chip (SoC) designs push the boundaries of complexity—with more transistors, greater integration and larger silicon areas—the established debug strategies are breaking under the weight of scale. Today’s advanced chips can generate an overwhelming number of design rule check (DRC) violations, sometimes reaching into the multi-millions across vast hierarchical designs.

For modern design teams, this challenge is not just about volume. The traditional debug process isolates every error, missing the bigger picture of systematic root causes and relationships. Sorting through thousands or millions of violation markers, tracing patterns and prioritizing fixes can consume team cycles for days or weeks. In today’s compressed schedules, debug bottlenecks are more than an inconvenience; they put product launches and business outcomes at risk.

There’s a clear need for a new approach—one that is smart enough to group related issues, fast enough to handle huge datasets instantly and intuitive enough for efficient team collaboration. The solution must not only work at scale but adapt to diverse workflows and keep distributed development teams in sync.

Recently, Siemens EDA announced such a breakthrough: Calibre Vision AI.

Smarter, faster debug: AI and database innovation at the core

Calibre Vision AI is fundamentally redefining what is possible in semiconductor physical verification. Its AI-powered DRC debug harnesses advanced machine learning to identify, classify and organize rule violations into “Signals”—smart clusters that share a pattern, context, or root cause. Designed for a new era of chip design and collaboration, Calibre Vision AI offers an experience that is both more powerful and dramatically more usable.

But breakthrough AI is only part of the story. Calibre Vision AI incorporates a shift in how DRC result data is managed and accessed—leveraging the highly efficient OASIS database format rather than traditional ASCII files. OASIS is engineered for the complexity and volume of contemporary SoC designs.

Fig. 1: File sizes for ASCII and OASIS output. The OASIS file holds all errors in a much smaller, performant package.

Instead of spending precious minutes or hours loading unwieldy ASCII-based databases and parsing thousands of lines manually, engineers can instantly access billions of error records with near-zero load times. Hierarchy is preserved, marker relationships are retained and the full context is available throughout the debug process. This lets teams see the entire landscape of violations at a glance, rather than getting lost in the weeds.

The actual effect is transformative: cycle times that once stretched into weeks shrink to days. By combining the intelligent clustering of AI with fast and scalable OASIS-based data handling, Calibre Vision AI delivers a powerful, responsive chip debug environment that sets a new industry standard.

Visualizing patterns and streamlining team collaboration

DRC debug is no longer the domain of a single engineering team working in isolation. Today’s physical verification demands deep insight from a spread of experts—chip integrators, block designers and project leads—often collaborating across time zones and organizations. Context is critical, yet in traditional flows, it is often lost in translation during handoffs or buried in lengthy email chains.

Calibre Vision AI addresses this by foregrounding both intelligent visualization and collaboration. Heatmap overlays display high-density violation regions across the entire chip, allowing teams to instantly identify and triage critical “hotspots.” Engineers don’t need to dig through text files or jump between disconnected tools; they see patterns and relationships unfold in real time, directly within their debug session.

Fig. 2: Signal-guided debug with Vision AI: from analysis in the GUI, highlight issues in the design tool, and accelerate iterative closure.

The platform’s collaboration features bring structure and transparency to complex workflows. Engineers create and share “bookmarks”—capture points that include not only precise analysis state but also notes, priorities and assignments. Each bookmark encodes the full debug context, supporting smooth transitions across work shifts, review cycles, or even organizational boundaries. With the ability to export and share HTML reports, teams gain a single source of verification truth.

This applies equally to team managers: having a clear view of progress and decisions accelerates status reporting and supports informed trade-offs. In a development world built on global, parallel block design, these capabilities are essential in keeping teams focused, productive and aligned on verification objectives.

Seamless integration into existing semiconductor design flows

Innovations only matter if they deliver results where real engineers work. Calibre Vision AI is purpose-built for embedded usability, meeting teams inside their existing layout viewers and physical design tools. Integration is smooth, minimizing training requirements and allowing immediate value with current chip data.

The solution maintains fast, interactive performance on even the largest designs because of its intelligent memory management and the modular, hierarchy-preserving nature of the OASIS database. Panels and analysis views update in real time—no waiting for re-indexing or cumbersome file reloads as debugging progresses. Engineers move seamlessly between design overview, cluster-level analysis and drill-down to specific violations.

Fig. 3: The Vision AI flow: Calibre nmDRC writes results to OASIS, which loads in seconds into Vision AI’s GUI. Designers use AI-guided Signal analysis to focus on systemic issues.

This practical approach supports faster hypothesis testing, easier annotation and review and higher-quality collaboration across departments—all with minimal workflow disruption. In effect, Calibre Vision AI closes the gap between world-class innovation and everyday usability, making AI-powered DRC debug a real asset for chip design teams of any size.

Cycle time reduction and collaboration: two pillars of a smarter debug process

The impact of these advances is clear on two fundamental fronts. First, cycle times—historically the most limiting factor in DRC debug—are slashed from days or hours down to mere minutes. Teams can review, triage and address issues at a pace that supports more, smaller iteration cycles, catching and fixing problems while they’re small. Projects keep momentum and last-minute surprises become far less frequent.

Second, collaboration becomes frictionless and robust. Bookmarks, shared debug sessions and HTML exports empower even distributed teams to retain context, communicate rationale and maintain design consistency. By keeping debug information tightly bound to design state and analysis context, Vision AI prevents costly misalignments and accelerates decision-making.

Bringing AI-powered DRC debug to the heart of chip design

Continued growth in chip complexity is a certainty. The only way to keep verification cycles—in both time and human effort—in check is with platform innovation that reimagines the fundamentals of the process. By uniting ultra-fast OASIS database handling, powerful AI-driven clustering and seamless team collaboration, Calibre Vision AI defines the new benchmark in semiconductor DRC debug.

The effects ripple outward—designers win back time, teams operate in closer harmony and products make it to market faster with fewer risks.