An Overview of the Penn State Design System

This paper overviews a CAD system under development at Penn State which will allow fast and near optimal implementation of a restricted class of VLSI architectures. Our target architectures are hierarchical mesh extensions of systolic meshes. Our target applications are primarily in the signal processing domain. The primitive components, at the lowest level in the mesh hierarchy, are one of the unique features of our target architectures. The CAD system under development includes: a tool for target architecture decomposition into primitive components, a tool for multi-level logic reduction for the primitive components; a tool for automatic gate placement within a primitive component; a tool for component placement within the target architecture; a high-level simulation tool; and a layout verification tool.