Design rule checking (DRC)
Beginner
Checking that every shape in the drawing follows the factory’s rules. Shapes can’t be too small or too close.
Novice
Running the factory’s rule book over the layout to find shapes the factory cannot reliably make: wires too thin, gaps too narrow, connections not covered by enough metal, areas with too little metal, and so on.
Expert
Running the foundry’s rule deck over the final merged layout, including metal fill and all third-party blocks. Modern decks are dominated by contextual rules, such as spacing that depends on a neighbor’s width or on whether a wire ends there. The result is a list of rules with violation counts and markers to step through.
Explained in Signoff (Design Flow).
See also: Layout versus schematic (LVS), Metal fill (density fill), Rule deck (runset).