A case study on rapid prototyping of hardware systems: the effect of CAD tool capabilities, design flows, and design styles

Author

Dollas, Apostolos ; Papademetriou, Kyprianos ; Sotiriades, Euripides ; Theodoropoulos, Dimitrios ; Koidis, Iosif ; Vernardos, George

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Tech. Univ. of Crete, Chania, Greece

fYear

2004

fDate

28-30 June 2004

Firstpage

180

Lastpage

186

Abstract

CAD tools are necessary for even the most rudimentary hardware designs when the target technology is FPGA or VLSI. This paper presents an experiment in the use of vendor-supplied vs. third-party tools, of high-level design (behavioral) vs. cell-based design, of technology tradeoffs among different vendors, and of design styles among designers. The experiment is a n-version hardware design project, in which many designs were made from common specifications, using different CAD tools and design styles. Some interesting conclusions can be drawn regarding the process, and these conclusions show new trends in terms of tool capabilities and desirable design flows.

Keywords

VLSI; circuit CAD; high level synthesis; integrated circuit design; integrated circuit manufacture; product design; rapid prototyping (industrial); CAD tools; FPGA; VLSI; cell-based design; design flow; design flows; design styles; hardware design; hardware designs; hardware systems; high-level design; rapid prototyping; technology tradeoffs; Computer aided software engineering; Design automation; Design engineering; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware design languages; Intellectual property; Libraries; Prototypes; Timing; Very large scale integration;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Rapid System Prototyping, 2004. Proceedings. 15th IEEE International Workshop on

ISSN

1074-6005

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2159-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IWRSP.2004.1311114

Filename

1311114