Automatic Programming Applied To Vlsi Cad Software A Case Study

This book, and the research it describes, resulted from a simple observation we made sometime in 1986. Put simply, we noticed that many VLSI design tools looked "alike". That is, at least at the overall software architecture level, the algorithms and data structures required to solve problem X looked much like those required to solve problem X'. Unfortunately, this resemblance is often of little help in actually writing the software for problem X' given the software for problem X. In the VLSI CAD world, technology changes rapidly enough that design software must continually strive to keep up. And of course, VLSI design software, and engineering design software in general, is often exquisitely sensitive to some aspects of the domain (technology) in which it operates. Modest changes in functionality have an unfortunate tendency to require substantial (and time-consuming) internal software modifications. Now, observing that large engineering software systems are technology dependent is not particularly clever. However, we believe that our approach to xiv Preface dealing with this problem took an interesting new direction. We chose to investigate the extent to which automatic programming ideas cold be used to synthesize such software systems from high-level specifications. This book is one of the results of that effort.

This book, and the research it describes, resulted from a simple observation we made sometime in 1986. Put simply, we noticed that many VLSI design tools looked "alike". That is, at least at the overall software architecture level, the algorithms and data structures required to solve problem X looked much like those required to solve problem X'. Unfortunately, this resemblance is often of little help in actually writing the software for problem X' given the software for problem X. In the VLSI CAD world, technology changes rapidly enough that design software must continually strive to keep up. And of course, VLSI design software, and engineering design software in general, is often exquisitely sensitive to some aspects of the domain (technology) in which it operates. Modest changes in functionality have an unfortunate tendency to require substantial (and time-consuming) internal software modifications. Now, observing that large engineering software systems are technology dependent is not particularly clever. However, we believe that our approach to xiv Preface dealing with this problem took an interesting new direction. We chose to investigate the extent to which automatic programming ideas cold be used to synthesize such software systems from high-level specifications. This book is one of the results of that effort.

Handbook of VLSI Chip Design and Expert Systems provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of expert systems, which provides a knowledge-based approach to problem solving. This book discusses the use of expert systems in every possible subtask of VLSI chip design as well as in the interrelations between the subtasks. Organized into nine chapters, this book begins with an overview of design automation, which can be identified as Computer-Aided Design of Circuits and Systems (CADCAS). This text then presents the progress in artificial intelligence, with emphasis on expert systems. Other chapters consider the impact of design automation, which exploits the basic capabilities of computers to perform complex calculations and to handle huge amounts of data with a high speed and accuracy. This book discusses as well the characterization of microprocessors. The final chapter deals with interactive I/O devices. This book is a valuable resource for system design experts, circuit analysts and designers, logic designers, device engineers, technologists, and application-specific designers.

It is a great honor to provide a few words of introduction for Dr. Georges Gielen's and Prof. Willy Sansen's book "Symbolic analysis for automated design of analog integrated circuits". The symbolic analysis method presented in this book represents a significant step forward in the area of analog circuit design. As demonstrated in this book, symbolic analysis opens up new possibilities for the development of computer-aided design (CAD) tools that can analyze an analog circuit topology and automatically size the components for a given set of specifications. Symbolic analysis even has the potential to improve the training of young analog circuit designers and to guide more experienced designers through second-order phenomena such as distortion. This book can also serve as an excellent reference for researchers in the analog circuit design area and creators of CAD tools, as it provides a comprehensive overview and comparison of various approaches for analog circuit design automation and an extensive bibliography. The world is essentially analog in nature, hence most electronic systems involve both analog and digital circuitry. As the number of transistors that can be integrated on a single integrated circuit (IC) substrate steadily increases over time, an ever increasing number of systems will be implemented with one, or a few, very complex ICs because of their lower production costs.

This book is an extension of one author's doctoral thesis on the false path problem. The work was begun with the idea of systematizing the various solutions to the false path problem that had been proposed in the literature, with a view to determining the computational expense of each versus the gain in accuracy. However, it became clear that some of the proposed approaches in the literature were wrong in that they under estimated the critical delay of some circuits under reasonable conditions. Further, some other approaches were vague and so of questionable accu racy. The focus of the research therefore shifted to establishing a theory (the viability theory) and algorithms which could be guaranteed correct, and then using this theory to justify (or not) existing approaches. Our quest was successful enough to justify presenting the full details in a book. After it was discovered that some existing approaches were wrong, it became apparent that the root of the difficulties lay in the attempts to balance computational efficiency and accuracy by separating the tempo ral and logical (or functional) behaviour of combinational circuits. This separation is the fruit of several unstated assumptions; first, that one can ignore the logical relationships of wires in a network when considering timing behaviour, and, second, that one can ignore timing considerations when attempting to discover the values of wires in a circuit.

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 9 QUADRATIC 0-1 PROGRAMMING 8S 9. 1 Energy Minimization 86 9. 2 Notation and Tenninology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 9. 3 Minimization Technique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 9. 4 An Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 9. 5 Accelerated Energy Minimization. . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 9. 5. 1 Transitive Oosure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 9. 5. 2 Additional Pairwise Relationships 96 9. 5. 3 Path Sensitization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 9. 6 Experimental Results 98 9. 7 Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 10 TRANSITIVE CLOSURE AND TESTING 103 10. 1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 10. 2 Transitive Oosure Definition 105 10. 3 Implication Graphs 106 10. 4 A Test Generation Algorithm 107 10. 5 Identifying Necessary Assignments 112 10. 5. 1 Implicit Implication and Justification 113 10. 5. 2 Transitive Oosure Does More Than Implication and Justification 115 10. 5. 3 Implicit Sensitization of Dominators 116 10. 5. 4 Redundancy Identification 117 10. 6 Summary 119 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 11 POLYNOMIAL-TIME TESTABILITY 123 11. 1 Background 124 11. 1. 1 Fujiwara's Result 125 11. 1. 2 Contribution of the Present Work . . . . . . . . . 126 11. 2 Notation and Tenninology 127 11. 3 A Polynomial TlDle Algorithm 128 11. 3. 1 Primary Output Fault 129 11. 3. 2 Arbitrary Single Fault 135 11. 3. 3 Multiple Faults. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 11. 4 Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 ix 12 SPECIAL CASES OF HARD PROBLEMS 141 12. 1 Problem Statement 142 12. 2 Logic Simulation 143 12. 3 Logic Circuit Modeling . 146 12. 3. 1 Modelfor a Boolean Gate . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 12. 3. 2 Circuit Modeling 148 12.

Monte Carlo simulation is now a well established method for studying semiconductor devices and is particularly well suited to highlighting physical mechanisms and exploring material properties. Not surprisingly, the more completely the material properties are built into the simulation, up to and including the use of a full band structure, the more powerful is the method. Indeed, it is now becoming increasingly clear that phenomena such as reliabil ity related hot-electron effects in MOSFETs cannot be understood satisfac torily without using full band Monte Carlo. The IBM simulator DAMOCLES, therefore, represents a landmark of great significance. DAMOCLES sums up the total of Monte Carlo device modeling experience of the past, and reaches with its capabilities and opportunities into the distant future. This book, therefore, begins with a description of the IBM simulator. The second chapter gives an advanced introduction to the physical basis for Monte Carlo simulations and an outlook on why complex effects such as collisional broadening and intracollisional field effects can be important and how they can be included in the simulations. References to more basic intro the book. The third chapter ductory material can be found throughout describes a typical relationship of Monte Carlo simulations to experimental data and indicates a major difficulty, the vast number of deformation poten tials required to simulate transport throughout the entire Brillouin zone. The fourth chapter addresses possible further extensions of the Monte Carlo approach and subtleties of the electron-electron interaction.