A survey of digital design reuse

As integrated circuit technologies advance toward higher performance, greater densities, and increasing system complexity, CAD tools and design methodologies struggle to keep pace. Managing the formidable complexity of the design process is one of the main challenges to IC design. Disseminating design reuse is central to bringing the design effort's complexity back to a manageable size. Effective reuse, though, takes more than just gathering predesigned components in a library. Reuse-oriented policies and strategies must permeate the entire design process, from the methodologies themselves to the final designs. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the state of the art in design reuse for digital systems. We also discuss the challenges posed to this discipline by the recent trend toward integrating processor cores in high-volume application specific integrated circuits.