Patent ID: 7743349

Claim:
A method for designing an integrated circuit, the integrated circuit comprising a plurality of elements, the method comprising: obtaining a lithography-simulated layout corresponding to at least one element of the plurality of elements in the integrated circuit, wherein the lithography-simulated layout includes simulated effects of lithography on the at least one element; determining an equivalent circuit representation corresponding to the lithography-simulated layout with respect to one or more performance characteristics and based on user preferences, wherein the equivalent circuit representation is in a form suitable for use by circuit analysis tool; and providing the equivalent circuit representation to the circuit analysis tool to analyze the one or more performance characteristics of the at least one element; wherein the step of determining the equivalent circuit representation includes selecting the equivalent circuit representation from a library based on the lithography-simulated layout, the one or more performance characteristics, and the user preferences such that the equivalent circuit representation and the lithography-simulated layout exhibit similar behavior for the one or more performance characteristics, wherein the library comprises one or more pre-defined element representations for a plurality of elements, wherein each method operation is executed by a processor.