Essential Issues in Codesign

Abstract

In the last ten years, VLSI design technology, and the CAD industry in particular, have been very successful, enjoying an exceptional growth that has been paralleled only by the advances in IC fabrication. Since the design problems at the lower levels of abstraction became humanly intractable earlier than those at higher abstraction levels, researchers and the industry alike were forced to devote their attention first to lower-level problems such as physical and logic design. As these problems became more manageable, CAD tools for logic simulation and synthesis were developed successfully and introduced into the design process. As design complexities have grown and time-to-market requirements have shrunk drastically, both industry and academia have begun to focus on system levels of design since they reduce the number of objects that a designer needs to consider by an order of magnitude and thus allow the design and manufacturing of complex application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) quickly.