A design-conceiving tool (DCT) environment to support the development of VLSI building block systems
Kuo Hsiung Wu · 1992
Several problems have been identified with the current electronic CAD tools: (1) limited capability and speed to simulate complex distributed systems, (2) incompatibility of tools at various design levels, and 3) inability to easily consolidate different levels of design detail to allow prompt design iterations and prototyping at all stages of the design cycle. The goal of this dissertation is to define a Design Conceiving Tool environment that assists system architects in developing, modeling and experimenting with the behavior of systems in the preliminary development phases and allows these models to be refined as the system design progresses. A unified modeling technique applicable to multiple levels of design is defined. Based on partitioning a system into multiple locally synchronous domains, a parallel simulation environment is developed, and evaluated through simulation. Algorithms are proposed and implemented to preserve the fidelity of the simulation results. A parallel hardware platform is proposed to improve the speed of simulation, and special techniques such as deaf-mode are introduced to speed up the simulation of complex system designs.