Design planning for high-performance ASICs

Design planning is emerging as a solution to some of the most difficult challenges of the deep-submicron VLSI design era. Reducing design turnaround time for extremely large designs with ever-increasing clock speeds, while ensuring first-pass implementation success, is exhausting the capabilities of traditional design tools. To solve this problem, we have designed and implemented a hierarchical design planning system that consists of a tightly integrated set of design and analysis tools. The integrated run-time environment, with its rich set of hierarchical, timing-driven design planning and implementation functions, provides an advanced platform for realizing a variety of ASIC and custom methodologies. One of the system's particular strengths is its tight integration with an incremental, static timing engine that assists in achieving timing closure in high-performance designs. The design planner is in production use at IBM internal and at external ASIC design centers.