System LSI distributed collaborative design environment for both designers and CAD developers/engineers

In this paper we propose a distributed system LSI design environment where both LSI designers and CAD tool developers/engineering can collaboratively work for higher performance designs. What we propose is a framework where not only design issues but also CAD tool related problems can be simultaneously taken care of by both designers and CAD engineers. Traditional design tools and flows are assuming to use CAD tools which have been fully developed and cannot be modified or enhanced when designing LSI chips. In order to use the most advanced LSI technology, however, it is essential to use the most advanced CAD tools which may not be fully debugged and tuned yet. This means that CAD tools must be enhanced when designing a new advanced LSI chip. Also we briefly discuss about implementation issues of the proposal on top of Croquet type distributed environments by showing a debugging process of hardware logic designs. We define consistency conditions on the use of CAD tools for the target LSI design flows including interface issues among various CAD tools used in the design flow and analyze them with a method similar to model checking type approaches used in formal analysis. We define virtual shared screens for both LSI designers and CAD developers/engineers collaboration and monitors activities on them, which are the base of our model checking type analysis. We examine various issues including interface checking among CAD tools, interface checking among design blocks, and tool performance enhancement/design modifications