An educational system of LSI design with free-wares for VDEC

VDEC (VLSI Design Education Center), which was developed in 1996, is a Japanese low cost prototyping service organization for LSI circuit development. Universitois can use commercial CAD tools through VDEC for designing LSI chips. However, it is difficult to use such commercial CAD tools in the beginners' classes of designing LSI because of complicated license management in VDEC. A lot of universities in Europe and USA have exploited freeware CAD tools in the beginners' classes, since they are simple, lightweight and easy to use. However, in Japan, such tools cannot be used for design LSI chips for VDEC fabrication. Here, an educational system, which supports designing LSI chips with VDEC using only freeware CAD tools, is developed. This system uses common freeware CAD tools: Alliance, Magic, Irsim and Spice3, and, in order to interface between them, original tools are implemented. For VDEC implementation, Alliance's technology files and libraries, Magic's technology file, and Irsim's library are prepared. As a verification, an 8 bit RISC processor is designed. From the evaluation of execution time, it is shown that this system is able to use in the class of designing LSI by using common PCs.