ARIES: A Workstation Based, Schematic Driven System for Circuit Design

ARIES is a workstation-based, schematic-driven software system for circuit design. It is divided into four major subsystems: SIZING, which generates transistor equivalents for logic gates (NMOS & CMOS technologies) and calculates their sizes (Widths & Lengths); PATHDELAY, which calculates path delays for circuits designed using standard cells; GRAPHICS, a 2-D plotting package that displays results from simulation programs such as SPICE, SUPREM, GEMINI and SUXES; and CANDETOSPICE, which generates, downloads remotely and executes circuit simulation input text files on a VAX 11/780. SIZING, PATHDELAY and CANDE2SPICE use CANDE, a schematic entry graphics editor and database as their front-end. ARIES runs interactively in a multiple overlapping bitmap window (concurrent processing) environment and is completely menu driven. All workstations and VAX 11/780´s are connected together via several 10 MB Ethernet LANs.