An Object-Oriented, Procedural Database for VLSI Chip Planning

Abstract

This paper describes Fred, a procedural database to support the architectural and floorplanning phases of VLSI design. The database holds hierarchical descriptions of modules that can be used to construct chips. Procedures provided by Fred can be used to compute the physical, electrical, timing, clocking, and functional properties of modules. The user can describe unimplemented modules with default values or approximation functions for these properties. The database can be searched by testing groups of modules with user-defined functions. Fred is implemented in Flavors, an object-oriented extension of Lisp; the object-oriented implementation aids both the designs of the database and the specification of modules for the database.