Patent ID: 7340697

Claim:
A method for designing an integrated circuit comprising the steps, performed by a data processing unit including a processor and a memory, of: receiving a source design comprising information identifying a plurality of devices; receiving information identifying a target process technology; determining whether each of the plurality of devices in the source design has a corresponding device model belonging to the target process technology in a master database, the master database being created by parsing a plurality of external databases comprising a plurality of device models belonging to more than one process technology and storing the plurality of device models as a function of the more than one process technology; and verifying the operation of the source design in the target process technology using the corresponding device models belonging to the target process technology in the master database; wherein the source design is modified when the verifying step indicates the source design is inoperative in the target process technology; wherein the plurality of device models in the master database is represented by one or more device model character strings, the plurality of devices in the source design is represented by one or more source device character strings, and the step of determining whether each of the plurality of devices in the source design has a corresponding device model belonging to the target process technology in the master database comprises comparing at least one of the one or more device model character strings with at least one of the one or more source device character strings.