Encounter Conformal ECO Designer ECO automation for greater predictability and design convergence Cadence® Encounter® Conformal® ECO Designer enables designers to implement RTL engineering change orders (ECOs) for pre- and post-mask layout, and offers early ECO prototyping capabilities for driving critical Yes/No project decisions. Engineering change orders (ECOs) have a wide variety of implementations that range from adding or removing logic in a design to more subtle changes such as cleaning up routing for signal integrity. All ECOs are focused on delivering products to market as fast as possible with minimal risk to correctness and schedule. ECOs can be a time of high stress, long work hours, and uncertainty. Even if the logic change is implemented in the netlist, there might not be enough spare gates on the mask to implement the change. Benefits Provides faster turnaround time by minimizing manual intervention and eliminating time-consuming iterations Generates early estimates on ECO feasibility by quantifying designer intent Implements complex ECOs that are typically not attempted manually Enables front-end designers in fabless semiconductor companies earlier netlist handoff to ASIC vendors Improves designer productivity and offers flexibility to do ECO with metal-only layers, thus reducing manufacturing costs and driving faster design convergence toward tapeout Reduces verification time significantly by using abstraction techniques to verify multi-million–gate designs much faster than traditional gate-level simulation Decreases the risk of missing critical bugs through independent verification technology