The configuration management for version control in an object-oriented VHDL design environment

The authors present a constraint-driven, object-oriented approach to configuration management within a VHDL design environment called SDE. A configuration is generated from a generic design in such a way that technology-specific cells are bound to the generic components of the design. In the approach, user-defined constraints are exploited to efficiently organize versions and to generate workable configurations. They are also used for providing the formal definitions of various relationships between cells, making it possible to easily explore versions of a configuration by substituting other cells with a certain relationship, e.g., replaceability, for its already bound cells. To retrieve cells that satisfy constraints for a configuration to be generated, the authors suggest an object-oriented query model based on a graph model.<>