VLSI Data-Management

With the field of Computer Aided Circuit Design moving into the realm of "intelligent systems", the logical representation of design data becomes of the utmost importance. The present paper starts out with showing how the multiview and hierarchical structure of the VLSI design data can explicitely be exploited to increase design efficiency. It soon becomes obvious that a versatile datamodel is needed to represent the structure of the data. We define a semantic datamodel and show how it is applied to produce a useful schema. Finally, we show how an object oriented design data manager is constructed and how it is capable of satisfying the requirements of (interactive) efficiency and of transparent handling of the data at a high level of abstraction.