AIRE/CE: a revision towards CAD tool integration

The growth in the microelectronics industry demands greater capabilities from CAD tools. This requires better-integrated environments and more design portability across platforms and tools. The move towards hardware description languages in recent years and interoperability puts a pressure on EDA vendors to come up with a well-defined standard intermediate format. The draft AIRE/CE intermediate format, as distributed publicly on the Web, is one such standard. Although this standard may be better defined and better documented than any other proposed standards for this purpose, it has shortcomings that must be resolved before it is adapted by the EDA vendors and designers. This paper discusses CAD tool integration problems and reviews the AIRE weaknesses in this area, and also presents our solutions according to our experiences with the AIRE implementation.