Wired: Wire-aware circuit design

Abstract

Routing wires are dominant performance stoppers in deep sub-micron technologies, and there is an urgent need to take them into account already at higher levels of abstraction. However, the normal design flow gives the designer only limited control over the details of the lower levels, risking the quality of the final result. We propose a language, called Wired, which lets the designer express circuit function together with layout, in order to get more precise control over the result. The complexity of larger designs is managed by using parameterised connection patterns. The resulting circuit descriptions are compact, and yet capture detailed layout, including the size and positions of wires. We are able to analyse non-functional properties of these descriptions, by "running" them using non-standard versions of the wire and gate primitives. The language is relational, which means that we can build forwards, backwards and bi-directional analyses. Here, we show the description and analysis of various parallel prefix circuits, including a novel structure with small depth and low fanout. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.