A design assistant for scheduling of design decisions

At the core of contemporary VLSI designs is the task of determining and evaluating the set of decisions relevant for the particular design project. In many designs the set of design decisions is handled intuitively, and also the set of alternatives for each of the design decisions is strongly influenced by experiences from earlier designs. The paper discusses the list of design decisions under consideration, their alternatives, and the ordering of such a set of design decisions. A set of practical designs have been analyzed using the system introduced in the paper.