K-3 The challenge of design flow integration and its impact on complex system design

The design of complex systems is composed of an ever increasing number of individual steps starting from architectural exploration, logic and physical implementation to methods for improving the manufacturability of chips and systems. Much of the emphasis of tool development and flow composition has been focused on the quality of the individual steps. For example, the evaluation if a logic synthesis tool is mostly based on an area/delay/power metric of the produced logic netlist. However, as the number of steps grows and their interdependence increases, an isolated view of these metrics reflects less and less the quality of the entire flow. There are two main forces that drive this trend: First, as simple abstractions between design steps break down, the interfaces between them become increasingly complex thus prohibiting simple quality metrics.