Polymath: A Platform for Rapid Application Development of Modular EDA Tools

It is imperative that new solutions in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) appear to cope with the increasing complexity of modern chips. However, the lack of broadly available platforms for rapid application development (RAD) of EDA tools hinders the volume and quality of the contributions from the scientific community. In this paper, we tackle this issue by proposing a RAD platform for EDA tools that enables the contributors to focus on the problem that they want to solve instead of “reinventing the wheel”. The proposed platform encompasses a user-friendly Tcl shell, a standardized data model, templates for quick creation of commands, a system-level Qt Graphical User Interface (GUI) and a user customizable Tk GUI, all synchronized by an event loop orchestrator with distributed processing capabilities. The amount of “boilerplate” code is reduced to a minimum in each stage of development. Finally, we propose the usage of a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment cycle to reduce the efforts on distribution of the tools developed on top of the platform. The platform was validated with the development of modules for the design flow of mixed-signal circuits.