Performance-directed synthesis of VLSI systems

The two tasks involved in the design of VLSI systems, synthesizing the circuit and then analyzing it to verify the desired behavior and performance, are becoming intertwined, and performance constraints are being used to drive synthesis. This approach requires the ability to explore efficiently many design options and to find global optima over the several consistently aligned representation levels simultaneously. General requirements for performance-directed synthesis are characterized, followed by an overview of algorithms used for performance optimizations both within and between the several levels of representation. The need for techniques for simultaneous constraint optimization and a perspicuous characterization of the total design space is highlighted