Design: Chip designers are allocated 14 working days to complete their part of the team effort; they must rely on scare, expensive software tools

Designers face mixed prospects in helping to develop on integrated-circuit chip in one month. Enough automated software tools are commercially available to help them do the job in 14 days, the deadline they must meet. Those tools, however, are expensive and in some cases hard to get. Furthermore, the limited performance of most tools today imposes certain constraints on the complexity, density, and performance of the chip.