An object-oriented concept for intelligent library functions

Abstract

The increasing complexity of electronic systems has led to a core based design methodology where large, predesigned blocks can be reused and configured to compose huge systems with several million transistors on a single chip. In a core based methodology, the designer, or the tool, selects an appropriate core from a library and adapts it to the surrounding environment. However, a specific core configuration in a specific environment very often opens up the potential for performance and cost optimizations which today cannot be utilized due to the inflexibility of cores. In this paper we propose an object oriented concept for a library of cores, which not only contains design models of the cores but also rule based design transformations to optimize the core in the context of a specific configuration and a specific environment.