Movie-an interactive environment for silicon compilation tools

Movie is a special-purpose environment for silicon compilation tools, providing services in the same way that an operating system does to application problems. Movie also contains the functionality of an advanced module generator tool. An internal design representation was developed that allows a combination of hierarchically parameterized module generators, symbolic layout, and interactive graphical editing. This design representation has been formalized into a representation language with well-defined semantics. Movie provides a set of operations, formally defined using the representation language, for use by the tools. A set of instantiation mechanisms ensure certain correctness of the result independently of the tools and closes the design-verification loop. Movie was designed to take advantage of fast color graphics, special-purpose data structures and incremental updating to achieve interactivity with immediate visual feedback by real-time animation. By integration high-level tools, a hierarchy of levels of abstraction is maintained. Silicon compilation systems based on Movie can be expected to be open-ended, transparent, and highly interactive