Efficient CAD development for emerging technologies using Objective-C and Cocoa

Future nanotechnologies will permit the manufacturing of computational systems of unprecedented complexity. It is not unreasonable to anticipate that, in order to analyze and design such systems, engineers will rely heavily on computer-aided design (CAD) software tools. As is the case with semiconductor CAD tools, the better one understands the underlying data structures and algorithms of a CAD tool, the more productive the user of the CAD tool is. The increasing challenges of future nanosystems will likely lead to blurring the division between system designers and the CAD designers and to merging of these two disciplines. Novel software development environments permitting powerful development of high-quality software will be required. This paper describes the experience of the authors with one such development framework based on the Objective-C programming language and the Cocoa application programming environment in a UNIX-based environment. These development choices were made because of the available programmer support, permitting development of complex applications in a straightforward way. A CAD application of moderate complexity for the simulation of asynchronous cellular arrays was developed with minimal effort. The authors believe that the ease of development using Cocoa is greater than in other similar development environments.