ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the design process, its major stages, and how electronic design automation tools fit into these processes. It examines the interfaces between the major integrated circuit design stages as well as the kind of information—both abstractions upward and detailed design and verification information downward—that must flow between stages. The product team partitions the system-level design into functional units and hands these units to the circuit design teams. In order to reduce cost, the product team may decide that the design warrants reuse of intellectual property. The design team attempts to verify that the design under test functions correctly. The design team might measure coverage in terms of number of lines of register transfer level code exercised, whether the test cases take each leg of each decision, or how many “reachable” states are encountered. A new generation of tools performs this “design exploration” in an automatic manner.
