Three Competing Design Methodologies for ASIC's: Architectural Synthesis, Logic Synthesis and Module Generation

This paper explores two questions: 1) What is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)? and 2) How applicable are current synthesis techniques to designing them? To address the first question we place common ASIC architectures within the spectrum of integrated circuit (IC) architectures. We also discuss the technological mediums, such as standard cells, in which ASIC's are implemented. To address the second question we review the popular synthesis methodologies and evaluate their applicability to the ASIC design problem.