How can design teams employ new tools and develop response methodologies yet still stay within design budgets? How much effort does it require to be an early adopter and what kind of measurable results compensate for this effort? Panelists discuss how their design-for-manufacture (DFM) tools fit into a fixed design methodology, budget and timeline, and give examples of expected ROI (monetary, quality, reduced time-to-market, and comprehensive yield).The aim of this panel is to provide a serious comparison of related DFM technologies on the market and some idea of the cost and difficulty of integrating the tools into a fixed design budget and timeline. Specific results will be cited, along with examples of expected ROI (monetary, quality, reduced time-to-market, and comprehensive yield enhancement).The audience should walk away with enough information to make an informed decision on which companies would make sense for their DFM challenges, to reach their own yield and throughput goals.

A long, long time ago, in a laboratory far, far away, EDA researchers and developers used paper tape instead of Linux, rubylith instead of GDS II, yellow wires instead of ten levels of metal. Sitting around a potbellied stove, in their rocking chairs, practitioners of that era (and this) will offer insight into why some great ideas were immediately put into practice while others stayed on the drawing board or in the ivory tower. They will share remembrances of things past, of simpler days when foundries made steel, when options meant CMOS or bipolar, when real parts were measured instead of benchmarks touted. Their stories of what it was like, what has changed, and whether the "good old days" were then or now will be followed by questions and, possibly, answers.

Increasingly, system houses are attracted to the customer-owned tooling (COT) model to gain more control of their schedules and costs. COT project risk and cost are high, often seeming more like customer owned "trouble," so the design team needs to be expertly prepared. The pathways to implement a COT design include (a) Manage the sourcing (internal or third party resources) of individual supply chain and cost reduction functions; (b) Use an integrated design-to-parts service; or (c) A hybrid of these two extremes. This panel will consider the pros and cons for each approach.

Despite a number of solid advances in simulation and verification techniques over the last twenty years, semiconductor chip designs continue to see large increases in the cost of verification - both in terms of human resources and time. Most of these increases are due to the growing size and complexity of the chip designs. Many of these designs are complete systems in their own right thus enlarging the scope of the verification problem. Formal verification has held out the most promise for reducing the magnitude of the verification task. Indeed, most major microprocessor teams - at IBM, Intel and Motorola - have routinely hosted formal verification experts since the early '90s. ASIC vendors and their tool providers have been closely following these developments into a number of initiatives and new startup companies driven by that very promise of formal verification. Despite these developments, simulation continues to be the final source of signoff - if not confidence - in chip tapeouts. Why is this so? Formal verification is an important technology to be left at the margins of the validation task. Will formal verification eliminate or limit unit level verification and provide the necessary glue for a realistic validation flow? Will the testbenches be replaced by constraints and assertions? Can validation effort be reused? This panel will explore the issues related to building practical validation flows, and the technologies that the designer community can realistically look forward to materializing in their lifetimes.

No abstract available.

Do formal verification tools and methodologies require a drastic overhaul to move beyond equivalence checking? Equivalence checking catches errors in synthesis and local hand-modifications to designs. However, powerful formal verification technologies are emerging to combat "behavioral" errors, which represent today's biggest verification problems. Nonetheless, formal verification experts are split on how formal tools should adapt to this challenge. Some of our panelists feel that designers can sufficiently benefit from new formal verification technologies by making incremental changes to current methodologies. Others, however, argue that major changes are required to reap meaningful benefits from these new technologies. Just how much change is enough, what is the capacity of our current tools and what is limiting the full deployment of FV technology.Our panel of experts, consisting of users, tool providers, and core engine builders, will answer these challenging questions. The panel will debate these issues while discussing real life examples from the user base. They will provide a perspective of how the progression of technology will bring the real promise of formal verification to the user base.

The focus of this panel is on issues surrounding the use of C++ in modeling, integration of silicon IP and system-on-chip designs. In the last two years there have been several announcements promoting C++ based solutions and of multiple consortia (SystemC, Cynapps, Accellera, SpecC) that represent increasing commercial interest both from tool vendors as well as perhaps expression of genuine needs from the design houses. There are, however, serious questions about what value proposition does a C++ based design methodology bring to the IC or system designer? What has changed in the modeling technology (and/or available tools) that gives a new capability? Is synthesis the right target? or VAlidation? Tester modeling or testbench generation? This panel brings together advocates and opponents from the user community to highlight the achievements and the challenges that remain in use C++ for use in microelectronic circuits and systems.

As microprocessor design progresses from tens of millions of transistors on a chip using 0.18-/spl mu/m process technology to approximately a billion transistors on a chip using 0.10-/spl mu/m and finer process technologies, the microprocessor designer faces unprecedented Electronic Design Automation (EDA) challenges over the future generations of microprocessors. This paper describes the changes in the design environment that will be necessary to develop increasingly complex microprocessors. In particular, the paper describes the current status and the future challenges along three important areas in a design flow: design correctness, performance verification and power management.

A two-stage procedure for locating VLSI faults is presented. The approach utilizes dynamic fault dictionaries, test set partitioning, and reduced fault lists to achieve a reduction in size and complexity over classic static fault dictionaries. An industrial implementation is reported in which faults were injected and diagnosed in a VLSI chip and the perjiormunce of two-stage fault location was measured.

Fault dictionaries are examined as a tool for automated diagnosis of VLSI failures. A compressed fault dictionary format and diagnosis algorithms are presented. Both combinational and sequential circuits are considered. Dictionaries are created, for example ISCAS circuits and simulated errors diagnosed.>

This paper describes the design and implementation of an arithmetic unit for a video filter. The central unit of the video filter consists of six identical chips called Common Arithmetic Unit (CAU's), each of which contains three Common Arithmetic Cells (CAC's). These 64-pin CAU's are assembled on a board in a pipelined architecture to realize real time performance. The throughput rate for the chip is 11.3 Mhz. A constant time pipelined adder design has been proposed and implemented. The absolute delay is stillO(\logn). The areaO(n\logn)and absolute delayO(\logn)for our adder are within a constant factor of the optimal bounds.

For fast binary addition, a carry-lookahead (CLA) design is the obvious choice (1., 3.). However, the direct implementation of a CLA adder in VLSI faces some undesirable limitations. Either the design lacks regularity, thus increasing the design and implementation costs, or the interconnection wires are too long, thus causing area-time inefficiency and limits on the size of addition. R. P Brent and H. T Kung (IEEE Trans. Comput.C-31 (Mar. 1982)) solved the regularity problem by reformulating the carry chain computation. They showed that an n-bit addition can be performed in time O(log n), using area O(n log n) with maximum interconnection wire length 0(n). In this paper, we give an alternative log n stage design which is nearly optimum with respect to regularity, area-time efficiency, and maximum interconnection wire length.