Hardware Design Automation

Considerable attention has been given to automating the design of electronic circuits during the last decade. The principal areas of research and development include: (1) simulation, timing verification and fault modeling, (2) placement, routing and partitioning, (3) silicon compilers, and (4) hardware description languages. Computer-aided-design systems have been recently introduced based on the above research. Techniques have also been developed for mapping numerical algorithms onto highly parallel architectures that are well suited for fabrication as VLSI/VHSIC chip sets. Design rule checkers may also be used to verify that a design meets a specified set of physical implementation constraints prior to fabrication. In this paper, these hardware design automation techniques will be surveyed to determine the state-of-the-art in this important area of computer-aided-design.