Preface

摘要

Today's hardware designers are required to balance requirements for performance and special features against steadily increasing pressure on design-cycle time, flexibility, and cost. Rapid advances in technology, library design, and design automation have made application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology an increasingly viable choice for many applications. An ASIC is designed using a predefined set of elements (logic functions, 1/0 circuits, memory arrays, and selected complex functions) called a design library, together with a suite of design tools that are used to perform logic design, analysis, and physical layout. The underlying technology, the library built on top of it, and the design tools all contribute to the effectiveness of ASIC technology for a given application. The papers in this issue describe some of the methodologies and tools recently developed by IBM for use in ASIC design, as well as some applications to actual product design for both IBM and IBM customers.