A Design by Example Regular Strcture Generator

This paper investigates technical issues concerning the automated generation of highly regular VLSI circuit layouts (e.g. RAMs, PLAs, systolic arrays) that are crucial to the designability and realizability of large VLSI systems. The key is to determine the most profitable level of abstraction for the designer, which is accomplished by the introduction of macro abstraction, interface inheritance, delayed binding, and the complete decoupling of procedural and graphical design information. These abstraction mechanisms are implemented in the Regular Structure Generator, an operational layout generator with significant advantages over first generation layout tools. Its advantages are demonstrated by a pipelined array multiplier layout example.