High level design: a design vision for the 90´s

Summary form only given. The amount of electrical engineering knowledge required in semiconductor design is decreasing and the process is now mimicking software design. Design re-use is moving upstream with sophisticated subsystems and flexible, technology-independent building blocks becoming available from ASIC vendors and other sources. The time spent debugging the applications software is vastly exceeding the development time invested in the hardware. Driven by the opportunity of million-plus gates ASICs on the one hand, sophisticated synthesis and simulation tools on the other, the design paradigm for most designers is shifting from the gate level to the functional level. With this shift comes the move to hardware description languages, increased design re-use, and active trade-off between software and hardware implementations. The author highlights the status and progress of this evolution and discusses its impact on semiconductor and system design in the coming years