O2ADL: an object-oriented analog VLSI design language

Object technology can be applied to analog VLSI design to exploit circuit compositional hierarchy, design process hierarchy and design module reuse. Conventional object-oriented programming languages are not suitable for such application due to the difficulties in describing VLSI circuit behaviour, modelling design technology/process hierarchy, implementing class name sharing and dynamically configuring design database. To overcome these difficulties, we have developed an object-oriented analog VLSI design language which provides a set of high-level constructs to conveniently describe and design VLSI circuits. A number of new concepts have been introduced in O²ADL and a dynamic-and-selective inheritance algorithm has been developed to model the design technology/process, to reduce the size of the design database and to achieve code sharing and reusability