Top-Down Layout for Hierarchical Custom Design

Champ, a chip floor-plan program, and Alpha, an automatic cell placement and routing system, provide a method for hierarchical custom VLSI design that is highly automated and completely top-down. The system can handle standard cell blocks as well as macro cells such as RAMs, ROMs, PLAs. Champ consists of initial block placement and block packing Designers can execute initial block placement either manually or automatically using a method based on attractive-repulsive forces. Block packing is performed automatically or interactively through the moving and reshaping of blocks, which is done as the chip boundaries are being shrunk. Following the floor-plan design, Alpha automatically executes cell placement and routing. Using Champ/Alpha, only seven mandays are needed to design a 20,000-gate VLSI layout, using a predesigned standard cell library and predesigned macro cells.