Intelligent VLSI design object management

Designing a VLSI chip is almost always an iterative process and a group effort. As a result, proliferation of design versions, becomes one of the most important issues in the development of design automation systems. The authors present the design and implementation of a VLSI object management system that supports several novel low-level storage management and access control services not found in previous systems. Among them are differential representation for design versions, integration of related versions, constraint-based synchronization mechanisms, and query/link access facilities for exploring the design versions space. This object system lays a foundation for customizing and implementing high-level version/configuration and concurrency control policies according to site-specific and group-specific needs