Guest Editors' Introduction: DFM Drives Changes in Design Flow

Design for manufacturability (DFM) has thus far been the focus of extensive study in the semiconductor industry. Although deep-submicron processes enable the manufacture of area-efficient, high-performance chips, navigating the nanometer landscape presents enormous manufacturability challenges.     

Embedded system design

In the past decade the main engine of electronic design automation has been the widespread application of ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). Present technology supports complete systems on a chip, most often used as so-called embedded systems in an increasing number of applications. Embedded systems pose new design challenges which we believe will be the driving forces of design automation in the years to come. These include the design of electronic systems hardware, embedded software and hardware / software codesign. This paper explores the novel technical challenges in embedded system design and presents experiences and results of the work in this area using the CASTLE system. CASTLE supports the design of complex embedded systems and the design of the required tools. It provides a central design representation, Verilog, VHDL and C/C++ frontends, Hardware generation in VHDL and BLIF, a retargetable compiler backend and several analysis and visualization tools. Two design examples, video compression and a diesel injection control, illustrate the presented concepts.     

VLIW Processor Codesign for Video Processing

A codesign approach for complex video compression systems is presented. The system is based on a flexible and programmable VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) architecture. The design approach can be subdivided into two phases: a quantitative analysis for deriving the main processor structure and a cosynthesis for generating the processor hardware and the compiler back-end. The analysis results of different video compression algorithms are summarized. This permits to adapt the processor to a set of related applications rather than to a particular task. A compiled instruction-set simulator for analyzing large data sets is presented. An HTML-based codesign framework is shown which documents and organizes the analysis data.     

EDA分布式计算变得越来越重要

我们提倡加强EDA和制造之间的联系,正如布线-布局与综合过去是两种不同的工作一样,隔阂始终会存在.由于时序和信号完整性问题相伴而存,我们不得不把它们紧密结合起来,以便计算出确切的延迟、功率和信号间的串扰,从而保证信号的完整性.只有在逻辑设计过程中考虑物理特性,才有可能做到这一点.     

器件技术和系统应用是未来IC设计的推动力

本文中展望了IC设计的未来，分析了推动IC设计发展的主要因素以及需要克服的问题。文章通过讲述掩膜生成、前端和后端制造在电子设计自动化(EDA)和可制造设计(DFM)方面的话题，阐明了来源于系统级要求的设计流程。     

The high-level synthesis of digital systems

High-level synthesis systems start with an abstract behavioral specification of a digital system and find a register-transfer level structure that realizes the given behavior. The various tasks involved in developing a register-transfer level structure from an algorithmic level specification are described. In particular, it is shown how the high-level synthesis task can be decomposed into a number of distinct but not independent subtasks. The techniques that have been developed for solving those subtasks are presented. Areas related to high-level synthesis that are still open problems are examined