A High Performance Graphic System for VLSI Design

Abstract

A high performance Graphic System for VLSI-CAD has been developed. A customized, 170k-gate, Graphic Processor (GP), the core component of the system, has high speed display functions with direct processing of primitives such as rectangles and cells without interpreting intermediate display formats. It supports high speed hardware editing functions and multi-user functions, with a large scale buffer memory.

The system has about 100 times, for display, and 1,000 times, for editing, as high performance as conventional graphic systems. For example, the display time of a 2,000-gate LSI (335K vectors) is about 3 seconds, all the editing times of the same LSI are shorter than 1 second, the display time of a 14,000-gate LSI (3.67M vectors) is about 25 seconds, and most of the editing times of the same LSI are shorter than 3 seconds.