1. Purpose
This procedure governs engineering change orders made after RTL freeze and before tape-out. Late in a project, restarting synthesis and implementation for every fix would cost too much time and would undo timing and physical closure already achieved, so fixes are patched into the existing netlist and layout. That speed carries risk: a patched netlist can drift from the RTL, and an incremental change can disturb its neighbours.
The procedure keeps the RTL as the golden source, proves every functional ECO equivalent to the fixed RTL, reruns the right verification and sign-off on the patched database and logs each ECO against the database versions it changed. The ECO log then forms part of the evidence for tape-out.
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