Design flows are the explicit combination of electronic design automation tools to accomplish the design of an integrated circuit. Electronic design automation ( EDA) is the category of tools for designing and producing electronic systems ranging from Microchipsjpg|right|thumb|200px|Microchips ( EPROM memory with a transparent window showing the integrated circuit inside Moore's law has driven the entire IC implementation RTL to GDSII design flows from one which uses primarily standalone synthesis, placement, and routing algorithms to an integrated construction and analysis flows for design closure. Moore's law describes an important trend in the History of computer hardware. In Integrated circuit design, Register Transfer Level ( RTL) description is a way of describing the operation of a synchronous Digital circuit GDS II stream format, common acronym GDSII, is a Database File format which is the de facto industry standard for data exchange of Integrated circuit Logic synthesis is a process by which an abstract form of desired circuit behavior (typically Register transfer level (RTL or behavioral is turned into a design implementation Placement is an essential step in Electronic design automation - the portion of the physical design flow that assigns exact locations for various circuitcomponents within Design closure is the process by which a VLSI design is modified from its initial description to meet a growing list of design constraints and objectives The challenges of rising interconnect delay led to a new way of thinking about and integrating design closure tools. New scaling challenges such as leakage power, variability, and reliability will keep on challenging the current state of the art in design closure.
The RTL to GDSII flow underwent significant changes from 1980 through 2005. The continued scaling of CMOS technologies significantly changed the objectives of the various design steps. The lack of good predictors for delay has led to significant changes in recent design flows. Challenges like leakage power, variability, and reliability will continue to require significant changes to the design closure process in the future. Design closure is the process by which a VLSI design is modified from its initial description to meet a growing list of design constraints and objectives Many factors describe what drove the design flow from a set of separate design steps to a fully integrated approach, and what further changes are coming to address the latest challenges. In his keynote at the 40th Design Automation Conference entitled The Tides of EDA, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli distinguished three periods of EDA: The Age of the Gods, The Age of the Heroes, and The Age of the Men. The Design Automation Conference, or DAC, is a combination of a technical conference and a trade show both specializing in Electronic design automation Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is an academic researcher teacher entrepreneur technical advisor and business man These eras were characterized respectively by senses, imagination, and reason. When we limit ourselves to the RTL to GDSII flow of the CAD area, we can distinguish three main eras in its development: the Age of Invention, the Age of Implementation, and the Age of Integration.
- The Age of Invention: During the invention era, routing, placement, static timing analysis and logic synthesis were invented. Placement is an essential step in Electronic design automation - the portion of the physical design flow that assigns exact locations for various circuitcomponents within Static Timing Analysis is a method of computing the expected timing of a digital circuit without requiring simulation Logic synthesis is a process by which an abstract form of desired circuit behavior (typically Register transfer level (RTL or behavioral is turned into a design implementation
- The Age of Implementation: In the age of implementation, these steps were drastically improved by designing sophisticated data structures and advanced algorithms. This allowed the tools in each of these design steps to keep pace with the rapidly increasing design sizes. However, due to the lack of good predictive cost functions, it became impossible to execute a design flow by a set of discrete steps, no matter how efficiently implemented each of the steps was implemented.
- The Age of Integration: This led to the age of integration where most of the design steps are performed in an integrated environment, driven by a set of incremental cost analyzers.
See also
- Post silicon validation, the final step in the EDA design flow
References
- Electronic Design Automation For Integrated Circuits Handbook, by Lavagno, Martin, and Scheffer, ISBN 0-8493-3096-3 A survey of the field, from which this summary was derived, with permission. Post-silicon validation and debug is the last step in the development of a semiconductor Integrated circuit.
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