Netlist Processing for Custom VLSI via Pattern Matching
Thomas S Chanak · 1995
A vast array of CAD tools are available to support the design of integrated circuits. Unfortunately, tool development lags advances in technology and design methodology - the newest, most aggressive custom chips confront design issues that were not anticipated by the currently available set of tools. When existing tools cannot fill a custom design's needs, a new tool must be developed, often in a hurry. This situation arises fairly often, and many of the tools created use, or imply, some method of netlist pattern recognition. If the pattern-oriented facet of these tools could be isolated and unified among a variety of tools, custom tool writers would have a useful building block to start with when confronted with the urgent need for a new tool. Starting with the UNIX pattern-matching, text-processing tool awk as a model, a pattern-action netlist processing environment was built to test the concept of writing CAD tools by specifying patterns and actions. After implementing a wide variety of netlist processing applications, the refined pattern-action system proved to be a useful and fast way to implement new tools. Previous work in this area had reached the same conclusion, demonstrating the usefulness of pattern recognition for electrical rules checking, simulation, database conversion, and more. Our experiments identified a software building block, the "pattern object", that can construct the operators proposed in other works while maintaining flexibility in the face of changing requirements through the decoupling of global control from a pattern matching engine. The implicit computation of subgraph isomorphism common to pattern matching systems was thought to be a potential runtime performance issue. Our experience contradicts this concern. VLSI netlists tend to be ...