Use of Change Coordination in an Information-Rich Design Environment

The growing complexity of VLSI designs has led to a partitioning of design responsibilities among different engineers, with the result that engineers work in parallel on different aspects of the design. With this division of responsibilities comes the need for automatic means of coordinating changes made by different engineers, and automatic means of administrating design policies laid down by management. In this paper we show how an information-rich design environment, incorporating (1) detailed knowledge of the design, (2) explicit representation of management´s policies, and (3) special software units called change coordinators, can be used to automate the functions of change coordination and policy administration.